Better Meetings

Rachel Salaman: So The Hamster Revolution, which we talked about last time you joined us, is a business parable about an office worker called Harold, who actually turned into a hamster because he couldn't get off the hamster wheel of information overload. We meet another hamster in your new book, can you tell us about her?

Mike Song: Sure, the main character in this book, her name is Iris and she's a sales vice-president for a large organization and she is finding that meetings are destroying her productivity. She's a really fun sort of upbeat person who is kind of slowly but surely devolved into a hamster, feeling like she is trapped in a hamster cage, late for meetings, meetings that aren't getting things done and really most importantly, meetings that make her look bad in front of upper management so that's another big problem with meetings, when they're terrible, they don't really help your career.

Rachel Salaman: No, there are lots of issues and you explore them in depth in your book. Why did you and your co-authors choose meetings as your next topic to tackle after email?

Mike Song: Well if you picture a pie chart in your mind of the typical day for the typical professional, about 25-30% of that time is spent in email and then another 25-30% is spent in meetings, so we thought it would be very exciting to work on this other big 25-30% chunk of the day and when we began to run some surveys on professionals, there were over 25-30,000 surveys at this point, we're finding that meetings are even more painful than email so we think it's a huge opportunity and we see a lot of changes and things happening out there that are going to make great meetings essential as people are asked to do more with less resources and time, meetings have to be good these days for an organization to move forward.

Rachel Salaman: And how have meetings changed, let's say in the last ten years?

Mike Song: Well they have become more virtual. Certainly we are seeing more teleconferences, more web based meetings now and that's exploding as a matter of fact as the go green movement and the desire to cut costs and even things like the swine flu are discouraging companies from having their people travel so much. We're also seeing meetings become less formal so they're thrown together very quickly, they're scheduled usually with some kind of e-calendar technology like Outlook or Lotus Notes, which makes it a technological challenge as well as a scheduling challenge to get people together in one place at one time to do productive work.

We are also seeing the frequency of meetings on the rise with well over 80% of professionals saying we meet too much, so more meetings, informal and virtual, adds up to less, less satisfaction with meetings, with the 43% number that you mentioned. Well I think the problem is that people haven't upgraded their meeting skills and I think it is time to make some changes because meetings just aren't the same any more.

Rachel Salaman: It's a bit like email in a way, isn't it, in that people don't really get formal training in how to do meetings, just like they don't really get trained how to do email.

Mike Song: Exactly. The fascinating thing that just makes us sit back and wonder why has it taken so long. People I think have often gone to a one or two day meeting facilitation workshop if they're a leader, but where's the training for the rest of us, for the people who go to meetings and sit in them and want to try to contribute and make that meeting better but they don't exactly know what to do, or how to articulate what would make that meeting better. All we need, just like with email, for meetings is a simple language, some new ideas that really mesh very well with the era that we're in, this era of information overload, the age of information and knowledge that we're in with the technology exploding and the amount of information we've got to keep track of exploding, we just need some very simple tools that we can work with in meetings and that's why when we wrote The Hamster Revolution for Meetings we wanted to write a new language for people to get them out of that hamster cage and make them feel like they're not trapped but are actually moving forward, which is really the best feeling that you have as far as your career. When you feel like every meeting is valuable and productive, you feel good about your work.

Rachel Salaman: In your book you lay out a five point plan for improving meetings, starting with how to meet less but more effectively and you suggest people use something that you call 'POSE Meeting Reduction Tool'. Now POSE is an acronym for Priority Obgenda – a new word there – Shorten and Evailable, that's quite a lot to take on but could you explain each of those four ideas?

Mike Song: It is a lot and of course we go into great depth in the book but to simplify each concept, really to give you the quick version of it, we noticed a few things. One, when a person was invited to a meeting, an optional meeting, let's not say a mandatory meeting but an optional meeting, there is a tendency to first look at your availability, to look at your calendar, can I make it? And really the question should be, is this a priority, is it the right thing for me to be doing? So that's the first part of the acronym, to pose the question, is this a priority for me, is this what I am really supposed to be doing?

Then the next question to ask is, what is the obgenda? We had some fun with word play here, noticing that a lot of people might have an agenda but no clearly purpose or objective. We said those two things should be meshed together, you know, they should be really one thing so we developed a new word obgenda for objective and agenda together. If you don't see those two things together you really don't know the driving purpose and you have no idea what the plan is for that meeting and without that, you'll go to meetings that you don't need to go to, without that you won't come prepared, without that you won't feel like that meeting is really essential for getting things done. So ask what's the obgenda and when people say 'huh?', you can explain that concept to them in a fun way and people really do enjoy then putting that into the minute invite.

And then shorten. We've noticed something that is a huge opportunity, there's a lot of back to back, one hour meetings – nine to ten, ten to eleven, and eleven to twelve. In the book we talk about something heart 20/50s which means you try to have a 20 minute meeting instead of a 30 minute meeting and a 50 minute meeting instead of a 60 minute meeting whenever possible. It's not always possible but if you can do that say 50% of the time, you are shaving ten minutes off of every meeting that you go to. You are freeing up time to return a phone call, put out a fire, something important is going on and you need to react, you are giving yourself some transition time. My kids go to school every day, they get to every class on time because they've got a bell that rings and they go and they have got eight minutes to get to that class. Well build that buffer in and you have got another benefit – not only are you not running around like a hamster feeling stressed from meeting to meeting but you are also going to meet less because you are going to cut a substantial chunk out of every meeting, ten minutes. The hard part of that is to emphasize that we are going to start right on time, we are going to start at 9 a.m. and get going so if you're late you're going to miss it, and we're going to have a hard stop too at 9.50 to allow you transition time and get everybody out of there on time. We found that not only helps shorten meeting time, it helps people get there on time which is another big benefit.

The last thing that we do is we really get into our corporate training and our workshops, we get into evailability, we take people's Outlook or Lotus or gmail or whatever they use and we help them really to start to mark that in a way that will allow people to see what their true availability is. So just to give one example of evailability, people will have a huge project that's due and they don't mark any time on their calendar to actually do that work so they schedule meetings in that time and then they get assignments from those meetings and those meetings might not be high priority for them and they go to that meeting, they come back and now what are they doing? They're working late at night and they are not doing their best work, they're trying to get in early and you have not only less productive work but people are feeling very frazzled, they are not happy about that so we work with color coding and lots of things and an e-calendar to make them more productive.

When you put it all together, and you start asking these questions: is it a priority, do I have an agenda, can I ask for some clarification on the purpose of this meeting, can I shorten it and am I really actually able to go to this meeting based on this schedule?, what you find is that people are meeting less and getting more done either by not going to a low priority meeting or by having a more productive meeting when they do in fact attend one.

Rachel Salaman: For people working in the kind of old paradigm, it might be quite hard for them to actually say no, they are not actually going to come to a meeting. How easy is it really for people to start saying no to meeting invitations?

Mike Song: Well really, that's the word, the simple two letter word no is something that is important for us to say more often. Now I know there are sometimes a sense of political obligation or a sense of well, this person helped me in one regard and I've got to help them. There are all kinds of transactions going on which are invisible but real in an organization. At the same time, what we've done in working with professionals is say we're not talking about saying no to 50 or 60 or even 70% of the meetings that you're going to, we're talking about one or two a week. Look for that opportunity on Tuesday and Friday, you know, to say look, I'm sorry, I've got something I've got to prepare for, I apologize but send me the action items, send me the notes, I would like to be involved in your meeting. That's a polite way of saying I care but I also just do not have the time to do this.

So the key thing here is to realize you are looking for one or two one hour meetings to avoid or shorten or perhaps combine with another meeting, to be creative about it and in the end you end up getting a lot more done and moving your career forward and I think you also end up pleasing the people who hired you to do a certain job and a lot of times people are going in to meetings that have not so much to do with their job description. So saying no is never easy, it's much easier to say yes, yes, yes, but at some point, as in all things in life, we've got to say not to that third drink if we're driving home, we've got to say no to a great opportunity when we've got to do something with our children, we've got to toughen up a little on meetings because 80% of professionals say we are just doing too much and the meetings are just not of value and that means we're wasting time and that's never good.

Rachel Salaman: Well the second point of your strategy is about making sure all the different elements that go into a successful meeting are included at the planning stage. You wrap all this up into an idea called 'Meeting Power Drafts'. Tell us about 'Meeting Power Drafts'.

Mike Song: I think it's fascinating that when you ask people, what's missing in your meetings? It's like a freight train leaving a station, they pick up speed and they start to realize, well we never have an objective or it's never clearly stated. A lot of people have topics for meetings by the way, business planning session, but they don't say why, why are we doing this or why are we having a sales meeting? They never say that overt important purpose so these ingredients are missing from the agenda or some ground rules that might get people not to talk over each other, to arrive on time and so on, so when I ask professionals why are these things missing, for a long time there is a blank stare there, they kind of look at you and say, I don't know, I mean we know we're supposed to do these things but I guess we just don't have time to do them, it's hard to do and I think it is because when you're setting up a meeting you're thinking about something that needs to get done but you're not thinking about how to meet well.

So a great solution, particularly for those of you who use Outlook or Lotus or Entourage, many of these other email software programs allow you to do this, here's an interesting tech tip and we have tons of tech tips in the book and in our corporate training. This tech tip is one that is near and dear to my heart, you create an email and you actually put in some of those ingredients that you'd like to have, so for example 'objective colon'. It is like you are creating a little form template for a great meeting, sort of a recipe for a great meeting. Objective colon – that's going to remind you to put an objective in. Agenda colon – and there could be action items underneath there for your team, for someone to write down those action items.

I always put my teleconference number in there because it's static, it's always the same so I don't want to go fishing for that when I want to set up a teleconference. You hit Save in Outlook or in Lotus Notes, and I know not all the people listening use those tools but you might experiment with what you use and find you can do this too, and that email will go to the drafts folder. Then when you have to schedule a meeting, when Rachel calls me and says, "Mike, we've got to meet about the next thing we're going to talk about, let's have a teleconference", I would just click and drag that email and drop it into my calendar icon and in Lotus and Outlook it turns into a meeting invitation. So now, with just literally two minutes to create that template, every meeting you have will have a trigger that reminds you, type in some kind of objective, make it specific and measurable – we are trying to increase sales by 10% by the fourth quarter – something real that will snap everybody to attention and let them know that this meeting is valuable and then you fill this out, you invite the attendees, you send it out and it takes almost no time at all and what you do is you get consistently great meetings because they have the right ingredients. You know, you are baking a cake here really, is all you are doing and you have the wrong ingredients and that's why the cake has a 43% dissatisfaction level! You're going to get up to 80-90%, you'll never please everybody with meetings, there are too many people who have different objectives in the organization but you can get up to 70-80% satisfaction with your meetings, everyone is going to think you are a great leader, everyone is going to think you are a great participant if you're helping facilitate this meeting scheduling process and everybody is going to get a lot more done.

Rachel Salaman: As you mentioned earlier, meetings have changed a lot in the last ten years and increasingly we're conducting teleconferences and meeting virtually online, and of course this comes with its own challenges, which you deal with in the third point of the strategy in The Hamster Revolution for Meetings. How should people decide what type of virtual meeting will work best for them in their situation because there are lots of different types aren't there?

Mike Song: There is and there are some etiquette issues and there are some interesting inertia here, by that I mean some people aren't plunging in and we've plunged into the web conferencing world and here's what we've found. It's getting better, there used to be more technical glitches so if you tried this two years ago and said, how do you use this tool? There are some terrific tools: GoToMeeting, WebEx, Adobe Connect. These are really exciting tools with lots of interactive features. So the first thing that I would say is this, if you are thinking Could we be more effective in virtual meetings? I would say try turning the lights on, and by that I mean if you are in a meeting and you are trying to describe something to somebody, why not launch an instant web meeting?

Now you can get free trials to all of these so to try it, it doesn't even cost you anything. Try saying, look, hey, I'm trying to describe the cover of my book or a chart or something that's happening and you say boom, let's all log in to this web conference. You can basically push a button and tell people a number and a website to go to these days and in two minutes you're all looking at your desktop, you are looking at that chart, that slide presentation, that competitor's website. That's great stuff, that's putting a visual to something where it was completely in the dark.

Now we would never go to a conference room with ten people, turn the lights off and say, let's get started. So why are we meeting in the dark when we have this great opportunity to show visuals and charts? I am so passionate about putting a visual there and here's a benefit that if you're not sold will probably sell you on the idea of doing this. Think about the other nine people in the meeting with you. They are probably going to start doing email, they will probably go on Twitter or Facebook or one of these social networking sites and pretend they're listening but they're really not and this is your important project. Well guess what? Make their computer light up with color, show them some stuff, show them some movement, use the chat function creatively perhaps to draw them in and you're going to find they are engrossed in your meeting and not off somewhere else doing something else that has nothing to do with your objective and the agenda. So I think we should embrace that technology, particularly at the web conferencing level first. There are some very high end video conferencing solutions but I think some people have overstated the value of those. If you get a million dollar video conferencing set up, that's great, I think it's great for executives, but for everyday employees I think we don't need that level of cost and we don't need that level of sophistication. Sometimes video conferencing equipment that's really sophisticated, you have to go to some place and sit in a room and that's not what we want, we want you at your desk, boom, you meet in 20 minutes and you're done. So think about really getting good at web conferencing, I think that's the sweet spot for productivity and for cost effectiveness right now.

Rachel Salaman: And perhaps they're not as hard to use for technophobes as people might imagine.

Mike Song: They're getting better. I remember six years ago trying to delve in to some of the tools that are still around today and they froze up, there were screen freezes, there was all kinds of technical problems. Now there still are a lot of technical glitches, I will say in all honesty people do make a number of mistakes when they run a virtual meeting, particularly a web meeting, that are easily prevented and we have a whole checklist that we go through with people so that they can just go check, check, check. I mean things as simple as shutting down your computer and restarting it if you have been using it for quite a while before going on to that web meeting with your boss and his boss and her boss, you know, so I think that is one of the key things to do, is to really refresh the computer. To get people there early is another big one and to arrive very early because once the technical glitches start happening and someone says, I'm trying to log in but it's asking me for a password and I don't have one – that stuff can take 15 or 20 minutes to resolve sometimes but as you get better at it, it becomes quicker and quicker, you start going through our Hamster Revolution checklist, you start doing things that make those meetings engaging and then suddenly your organization is saving millions of dollars which we're really proud to say we're helping organizations save millions of dollars by increasing the amount of virtual work they're doing, and making those meetings more engaging is the next step.

Rachel Salaman: You mean making the web based meetings more engaging through visuals?

Mike Song: Exactly, exactly. Now many people just turn them on and start running a slide presentation and that feels again, we always have this analogy, you don't want people to feel that they are in a hamster cage or inside this meeting cage, you want them to feel really excited and engaged to be there. Well the first thing that you have to do is talk to people, you have to get a dialog going and the beauty of these web tools is they usually will have a chat feature.

Here's something that really, I was against this and then I tried it and it completely changed my mind and that is that I worked with a team from a big real estate company in the States and they said, "We're going to chat during this meeting, while you're presenting your stuff we'd like to have a running commentary, if we agree, if we disagree". I said, "What? You're going to chat, everyone is just going to chat the whole time?" So I said, "I'll try it, I'll try it but I think it's going to be very distracting", but it turned out to be actually very easy for me to glance over and read that little chat line and see what people were saying. 80% of the time it was very positive, once in a while they would challenge something, which is great to know as a presenter, it would open up a dialog and allow me to present some additional evidence and win those people over most of the time. They were just being honest, they were being funny, they were making little jokes that made the whole thing entertaining. Now it's not that easy to be funny as a presenter but for a 90 minute webinar it was fun, there were a couple of people that had some really insightful, fun things to say and the other beautiful part about making yourself a virtual chat champion is that there are ideas that quiet people keep to themselves in live meetings, where they have to break in to a teleconference verbally. It's very hard. So this chat flow is very powerful and it is the first thing I would do to start building interactivity into every web meeting.

Rachel Salaman: Well the fourth part of your meeting improvement strategy is about keeping on track in the meeting itself, a very important issue and you introduce readers to the NNNO tool, that's no with three Ns. How does that work?

Mike Song: Well this is somewhat visual so I'll try to describe it but if you can think of two axes, an X and a Y axis and on the vertical axis you've got urgency, urgency, and on the horizontal axis you've got importance of an item that gets brought up spontaneously in a meeting that could veer the meeting off course, the classic tangent – and some people would call it a rat hole – that a group will go down, another rodent analogy for you. But the idea here is that people are caught off guard by tangent items, they are unexpected, sometimes they are forcefully introduced as really important by one person in the group and so we wanted to give people a tool that would sort of in a classic sense allow them to ask the right question and figure out what to do in a heartbeat.

So we came up with this tool, the NNNO tool, and basically just to really give you the four quadrants of this tool so that you can think about it. The first step is to simply ask, is this new topic more important and more urgent than what we've got on the agenda already? It's an honest question, you can ask it with some sincerity or with a smile and a lot of people will immediately say, do you know what, maybe it's not, so they'll understand I've just brought up my own pet peeve or the thing that I like to talk about but if they say, well maybe I think it is, then you can apply this NNNO principle. If it's not more important and not more urgent based on what it is, you can discuss it with the group or defer to the leader or ask the person who brought it up, if it's no then we say no, we're not going to discuss this at all, so that's the first N.

Now if it's important but not urgent, then we say Next, let's discuss this at a future meeting and then you really do have to put it on the schedule or you'll lose some credibility with that person but next is a great alternative to having a meeting where you don't get to cover what you need to cover so it's No, it's Next and then Now. If it is more important and more urgent on our XY axis, let's talk about it, let's bump something off and that's another thing that groups sometimes don't do, they'll say well it's not on the agenda so we can't cover it. Well there are situations where you can cover it, that's the beauty of this tool, it actually helps that person who brought up that topic if we can validate this as something we should be talking about, right here right now. A lot of times what we find is that those now things are things that are parts of a process that you have to go through before you get to the part the group wants to discuss, so before we discuss that, we have to discuss the location or the pricing or something like that.

Then O stands for Off-line, that's when something is sort of urgent for one person probably in the group but not important overall to the group's purpose of meeting or the group's mission and then those are often things that you can take off-line, just a great business word. Let's take it off-line, I will sit down with you, we will discuss that but it's not really something for the other nine people, this relates to your performance review or your computer technology or the fact that you are looking for some type of different vacation schedule, that's you. So we have this picture of a meeting monster, we call him Ted Tangent, and he likes to chase shiny things and there are quite a few of those out there, people like Ted. I may be a little like Ted myself and it's good to ask myself when I bring up something with my group, is this really more important and urgent than us getting through this sales or planning or budgeting meeting?

So that's the NNNO tool, that's how you can say no and stay on course and get more done.

Rachel Salaman: It's interesting that you suggest that someone other than the main facilitator takes charge of keeping things on track, why is that?

Mike Song: Well I think it's because they are usually focusing on trying to have a productive meeting, on the content, they are very focused on the content and it is very helpful to have a sidekick, a person who is a helper, someone else on the team and this role should be rotated, that we call the Obgenda Defender, the person who is going to actually defend the driving focal purpose of the meeting. If you think about it, most meetings don't have a person assigned to that. They may have a person who is the time keeper which sounds just about as boring as – that could put coffee to sleep to be a time keeper, it's almost demeaning. I like the idea that this person is almost the hero of the meeting, the Obgenda Defender is like a superhero and they are basically there to try and make sure that someone asks that important and urgent question and then say, "Huh, is that more important, what do we think guys?" And look around the room at everybody and if your co-workers are saying, I think we should get to what's on the agenda, it is a great way. So that's a fun role, people always laugh, they say "Okay, as the Obgenda Defender I've got to step in here, we've only got 20 minutes left and we have all this stuff to get through, I don't know if we can talk about that" and people laugh just when they hear that silly name that we came up with, but it ties together that obgenda from the POSE tool, we are staying on course in a kind of a nice connectivity and in the book and the workshop we weave together all these simple concepts into this great meeting philosophy and I think that's why it's been so successful so far.

Rachel Salaman: Well just finally, we should look at your last point in your five point strategy which is about making sure that people actually complete their action points, another really important thing. What are your tips here?

Mike Song: Well here again, as you said before Rachel, we go to these meetings, we're trained so well in so many ways by our organizations but where's the training which makes sure that these meetings which are taking up millions and millions of hours of labor time for even relatively small two-three hundred person organizations each year, how can we guarantee that when we decide what we're going to do, everybody does it? It's a very, very critical final piece of the puzzle and I think what we need is some direction, a MAP if you will, and that's an acronym for Meeting Action Plan and so every person who reads our book and goes to our corporate training walks away with the understanding of what their MAP is and it may be a little different for different people, we really like to tailor our stuff but here's what it basically consists of.

Number one, you don't want to have meeting notes. Again we're not trying to put coffee to sleep here, we're trying to wake everybody up so we want action items and a great place to put action items is in the task function within Outlook or Lotus Notes. Now if you have the ability to assign tasks to other people, this might be something to explore anyway, it's a great productivity tool but a cool thing to do is to take down those action items, one person on one sheet of paper, and send them out as a task because these are actions and a task function, a to do list function in Lotus or Outlook or any of these tools, is really useful and so I think it's neat to send it out. You can assign tasks to multiple people on these tools so you can just select your team distribution list or put the people from the meeting on there and put those action items in the task.

One final action-oriented thing that I'll leave you with is the idea of review times two, so review times two is that you are not just going to write this stuff down and go away, but you are going to quickly review the actions at the end of the meeting and then you are going to review them at the beginning of the next meeting, so that is a great way to reinforce that we are going to get these things done. At the very least, try to review them at the beginning of the next meeting rather than just jumping in and finding out 20 minutes in that half the people did it and half the people didn't. So those are just some elements of the MAP strategy that will really help people get more done. Leverage the technology, try that task list and make sure you review times two, think about actions instead of notes because that activates people instantly – Oh actions for me's I'm going to get those done – and I think those are some great ways that you can get things moving and get more done.

Rachel Salaman: And if you were to pick let's say just three tips for people to start applying today to make their meetings more productive, what would they be, apart from buying The Hamster Revolution for Meetings?

Mike Song: I think having an obgenda for every meeting is simple, it's fun, it's different, it's new and it spreads to other people so number one, I want everybody listening to say from here on out, I have an obgenda for every meeting that I go to and just watch how those results will change. Another one that I would recommend is to build your personal mantra – five minutes early is the new on time for me. That's a powerful philosophy, part of your own personal brand and identity. I show up five minutes early. When you are five minutes early you can network, you can go to the bathroom, you can do all of these different things, you can prepare a little more, you can think of one thing that will make this meeting more effective. When you are five minutes late you are frazzled, you're embarrassed because you're coming in late, it's terrible. So that would be the second thing, is to make five minutes early the new on time. I think the third one would be to master the technology surrounding meetings. There is a lot of etiquette, they are e-scheduled, a lot of meeting invites show up on PDAs so how can we build that content into a Blackberry or an iPhone or a smart phone so that we can see what the meeting is about? All of those kinds of tech tips are things that we love to delve into in the training and on our website, InfoExcellence.com, and of course in the book, The Hamster Revolution for Meetings – how to meet less and get more done. So those are the three things I would say: have an obgenda, be early and master the technology surrounding meetings and you'll be a meeting superhero, superstar and you'll really find you are a lot less stressed and you are much more productive.

Rachel Salaman: Mike Song, thank you very much for joining us.

Mike Song: Well it's been a pleasure being here with you again, first email, now meetings and I can't wait to do whatever's coming next.

Rachel Salaman: As Mike mentioned, you can find out more about The Hamster Revolution and his work at www.infoexcellence.com.

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.