Rele-Vance

Getting rid of unnecessary attendees your meetings – relevance

To celebrate our 20th birthday, we have launched a “Better Meetings Campaign” to help people cut down the number of meetings, conference calls and webinars that they attend, and improve the quality and conduct of those that remain.

One of the themes is getting rid of unnecessary participants from your meeting. In our Better Meetings survey we found that most people think that 25% of participants or more were unecessary to the content of their meetings.

Part of it is recognizing that not everyone needs to attend for every topic – the trick is having the right people at the right time on topics that are relevant to them.

Here is one example. Vance is a great participant. He has contributed to one topic but realizes that the rest of the meeting is of low relevance to him and he’s keen to get back to work.

Instead of sitting being bored, he has taken responsibility for his time and proposes to leave the meeting.

Most of us would recognise that as very healthy and assertive behaviour. But what do you think would happen if he did this in your organization, would people congratulate him or be offended?

How great would it be if you could do this in your meetings?

It’s likely that for almost all the topics in your regular meetings there is someone there for whom the topic is not relevant.

This is an enormous source of waste and frustration in business meetings.

If you’d like to find a solution to this and other common problems around meetings, signup for our free Better Meetings Campaign. You will receive a booklet each week for six weeks with some specific tools, tips and actions you can take to resolve six of the key challenges in having fewer, better on and off-line meetings.
We are also running a Better Meetings survey: you can take it here  and find out how you compare with other organizations: Better Meetings Survey.

If you would like fewer, better meetings, join: The Campaign for Better Meetings.