Recorder

accounting + business tools + collaboration

RECORDER meeting manager

Corporate Secretaries understand the significance of properly convened board meetings and properly prepared and agreed minutes. But there are many other kinds of meetings happening within all organizations that are also important. Project meetings, Trustee meetings, Governors meetings, Sales meetings, Department meetings, Staff appraisal meetings etc.

The RECORDER helps you to get the best out of your meetings.

This is the typical cycle of a typical formal meeting:

The corporate secretary (or project secretary etc) sends the agenda to members of the meeting and a time, date and location. Some agreement is reached on that, then the meeting is held, minutes are taken and subsequently circulated for approval. The next meeting takes place following the same routine. However, in a typical scenario it would not always be the case that meeting papers are circulated before hand, that members bringing new papers to the meeting have circulated it beforehand, or that minutes on repeated agenda items are readily available to members. The result is that the meeting often takes much longer than it needs to because members are not properly prepared.

It would also be relevant to consider how the items discussed at meetings correlate with the critical success factors of your organization. For example, how does the time spent on each agenda item contribute to the core competences of the organization, or profitability, or customer service?

A report produced by Ayers Consulting in the US said that there were 25 million meetings taking place in corporate America every day and that roughly half that time is wasted. They describe that the most common problems with meetings is that they:

Try to accomplish too much. You can’t do an information dump, solve problems, make decisions, plan for action, etc., all in one short meeting.
Lack clear objectives and/or organization. If objectives have been identified, the agenda may not properly reflect them. [Not all meetings benefit from an agenda. If problem solving is the objective, for example, the nature of the problem(s) may not be apparent until the group meets, making an agenda premature and possibly a deterrent.] There may not be an established process to allow each person to contribute to meeting the objectives.
Lack clearly defined roles for participants. Too often team members are asked to carve out valuable time for meetings in which they have no real role. “I talk, you listen” isn’t a good format because no one listens.
Minimize differences of opinion and conflict. Emotion is given no place in American business—certainly not in decision making. We don’t know how to handle strong emotions, so we suppress them in meetings. We even expect our meeting leaders to suppress them for us. Yet it’s emotion that contains the passion and commitment we strive for.

The RECORDER is another collaborative NUTCRACKER. It ensures that all those involved in meetings are best prepared, can contribute towards achieving the objectives of the meeting, and do not waste their time as is so often the case without it.