Running efficient and effective meeting with onsite team
This is the same same but different article on running meetings. The other one I wrote is for meetings with remote team (here)
This article has a lot of general points like its brother article but I want to highlight some differences. Running an onsite meeting is easier, yet more vulnerable than running a remote meeting. The presence of stakeholders (or elephant in the room) is both the biggest pros yet cons in onsite meeting.
This article’s scope is to run efficient and effective meetings with 5 people or less. I think 5 is a good number. Any meeting that has more than 5 people highly likely goes nowhere. Or maybe I haven’t found a way yet. For sure, there are meetings that I host with more than 5 people but with purpose of demo or updates.
About me and team: As a PM, I have to interact with multiple stakeholders internal and external. There are meetings that I host or attend as participant or really don’t understand why I’m invited.
My belief: As a meeting host, it’s important or fundamental to understand the meeting’s dynamics, important stakeholders’ intentions and my (professional) relationship with each stakeholder.
Onsite team is … onsite. As a host, apart from running through the meeting agenda, there are few things I carefully observe:
Similar to remote edition: here (1) Main stakeholders need to know what is the expected outcome BEFORE the meeting (e.g. to get certain decision made). (2) Relevant stakeholders prepare for the meeting BEFORE the meeting (3) Organiser prepares communication methods (e.g. slides, image, call, notes taking during meeting) to facilitate the meeting (No one would want to spend additional 15 mins because of some technical issue) (4) There are meeting summary and follow-up (if required) sent out.
Special to onsite team:
No verbal-only discussion: Yes, being present together is the perk of onsite meeting but it doesn’t mean people should just chill out and talk. Main discussion points should be written down on whiteboard, for everyone to see and ask questions. This would reduce the monologues going on. Even when using board, the meeting host should be one initiating and doing it most of the time. It makes sure that I understand what’s going on and am able to communicate the speaker’s message to other people. I have seen people expressing their idea by doodling on board and I really hate it. This seriously makes the content more confusing, and people confused. I end up spending time asking them to explain again.
Elephant in the room: A lot of meetings have this issue. The common elephant is boss. Boss is in the room so people cannot say No / share idea freely. A good way to counter this is by saying “Regarding this topic, Mark previously shared with me the idea about ABC and I think it’s pretty interesting. Mark, do you think you can share more?”. There is a lot going on in that statement. It gives the idea owner (in this case, Mark) credit and confidence to share (because I said “it’s interesting”). Most of the time, I use this tactic when I knew (1) Boss will be the elephant in the room the moment I send out calendar invite, (2) I asked stakeholders to prepare for meetings and have heard their ideas. This could happen over lunch time or coffee chat, (3) And boss is not the dictator kind. If your boss is the my way or highway type, don’t waste everyone’s time in having discussion. However, this only applies to internal meetings. I have no good way to crack this issue with external team.
Distracted people: Some people join meetings to … do their own things. They are the time-wasters in every single aspect. However, this is a delicate matter to handle. It’s weird to call out their behaviour in front of everyone. Yet, if I don’t do that, I’m wasting people’s time. I have 2 tactics, which I find them pretty funny. (1) I love having meetings where people HAVE TO stand up (because the room is too small for all invitees or simple has no chair). This make sure people cannot use their laptops comfortably, and put 100% of their mind in meeting. I bluntly state this reason to whomever question my weird choice of meeting room. (2) In case people sit down, depending on the importance of the stakeholder, I will wait till some people are in discussion and quickly go the the distracted guy and tell them to focus on the meeting.
I have some pretty interesting experience with onsite teams (internal and external).
External meeting (with Malaysia client): I was invited to a meeting of 10 people from client side. That was already a bad sign because we had to sit in their board room. Not just that, the boss from client side participated in the meeting. And not surprisingly, other guys just nodded along and didn’t ask questions. What we did was after the boss stood up and left the room, we sat back to make small talk and getting to know people. But to my surprise, people started discussing and contributed more. This was when the meeting became efficient and effective. In the end, the actual meeting lasted for 1 hour and we sat back for another 1 hour. This is the cultural point that I learnt.
Brainstorm meeting: I used to attend some brainstorm meetings that were supposed to last for 1 hour or less. Most of the time, if the meeting host couldn’t run the meeting properly, I usually walked out of the room after 30 mins or 1 hour. My tactic was to leave something behind (e.g. my expensive water bottle) so I looked like I went to toilet. But nope, I never came back haha. No point staying as it was time wasting.
Meetings that I don’t understand what’s going on: There were times I faced comprehension difficulties (literally) in meetings. This was mostly due to accents. This was hard because pointing out the issue in the meeting didn’t really solve the issue. It’s not like people can change the accent within 1 minute. Most of the time, visualisation helps. And in case that the accent is so bad and affects everyone, I would request the person to write out a summary email and find some lame excuses to end the meeting earlier.
Those are my tips for running a good meeting with onsite team.