About Meetings

Issues with meetings

If meetings were easy and everybody would be satisfied with how we use and execute them, there would be no need for meeting best practice resources like this one. The truth is that there are so many things that can go wrong with meetings that a lot of people start hiding or running when they even hear the word meeting!

Some of the main issues with meetings are lack of preparation, lack of knowledge and experience on running a meeting, no follow up after the meeting and last but not least too many (and unnecessary) meetings!

The only way to improve this is to educate ourselves and take a fresh look at how we can improve the entire meeting process. It is in every organizations interest to invest and support this. One way of doing this is to create and enforce a basic and simple meeting policy.

Meeting standards

For as long as we can remember, people have been using meetings to make decisions or to provide or collect information and yet there is no such thing as a list of standard meeting types, agendas, minutes, etc.. Each organization has their own habits, customs and traditions that are sometimes difficult to change.

With the increasing availability of the Internet, email and other communication tools the importance of standards and best practice is being recognized and implemented by many organizations worldwide. We are still far away from real standardization in the meeting process but we are moving in the right direction.