Chapter 14

Continuous improvement and follow-up

 

Actions – establish a continuous improvement process in your meetings by reviewing past actions

 

Target – improve the implementation of decisions and actions taken in your meeting

 

 

One of the oldest and most effective meetings practices is to keep a note of actions and decisions made at the meeting and then, at the next meeting, review whether the actions were completed or decisions implemented. It is very simple and obvious but it is surprising how few meetings actually do this.

Just having this process in place will significantly increase the probability that people have implemented their actions; if not, they need to explain why.

If any individuals with actions from the last meeting are not attending the meeting, then the meeting facilitator should check the progress of these actions before the meeting and report back on their behalf.

An old saying in manufacturing is “expect what you inspect.” If you do not pay any attention to whether your actions are implemented, then you are signalling that you do not think this is important.

If actions have not been completed, then they should carry over to the next meeting and the individual concerned should come along and explain why not.

 

“We have a stand-up production meeting where we review outstanding quality problems every morning. All actions are displayed on a large magnetic board and, so long as an individual had an action live on the board, they must turn up every morning to explain what is happening with it. As the meeting is at 8 a.m. every day and is very public, people tend to complete their actions very quickly.”

Production supervisor, packaged goods, USA

 

This is effectively a continuous improvement process for your meetings outcomes.

If you keep a record of your meetings actions and check whether they were implemented, you can quickly see whether creating these actions was worthwhile. If they are not being implemented, why is this? Is it that they are poor quality actions, or do you not really have the authority to make those types of recommendations, or is it that you need to improve the implementation of your decisions?

If some specific participants are regularly not following up on their actions, you need to speak to them about why and, if necessary, replace them in your meeting.

Teams that employ this continuous improvement approach often find that they need to do a better job of communicating their actions, so check if this has been one of the problems.

Continuous improvement check

To keep your meetings from slipping back into bad habits and to keep them evolving to cope with new topics, participants, and technologies, it is essential to get into the habit of continuous improvement.

At the end of your regular meeting, webinar, or call ask participants the following questions, or come up with some of your own (you can do this on a flipchart, online poll, or follow-up email).

 

1.	Was this meeting a good use of your time?

2.	What specifically would have made it (even) better?

3.	Did you receive the outcomes and process for this meeting far enough in advance to prepare?

4.	Were the right participants in the meeting to achieve the planned outputs? If not who should or should not have been there?

5.	Did we stick to time?

6.	Were the topics relevant to you? If not, which specific ones were not?

7.	Did the process of the meeting allow you to take part as you wanted to? If not, what would have made it better for you?

8.	Did the meeting focus on collaboration, decisions, and discussion rather than information-giving?

9.	Were the decisions and actions from the meeting recorded and communicated?

10.	Did we review the implementation of actions from the previous meeting?

11.	Did we achieve the outcomes we planned?

 

If you act on any areas where people are dissatisfied you will continuously refine the conduct, content, and quality of your meetings.

Younger participants in particular value this constant feedback, input of their ideas, and improvement. The more opportunities you can create to encourage immediate feedback and act on this, the faster you will improve.

You should do this at least once a year with all your regular meetings.

Make your meeting OPPT-ional

Now you have re-engineered your meetings to be much more relevant and engaging, here is a real test of whether they are actually a great use of people’s time.

Make your meetings optional. If people choose to attend, then this is telling you that they value the meeting. If they choose not to attend they are telling you that this meeting is not as useful as alternative ways of spending their time.

If people opt out of your meeting, then you should first consider that perhaps they are right. It may be that they are not the right participants or that your meeting is not as valuable to them as you think.

If you have truly designed a successful OPPT meeting, then people should choose to opt in.

 

Trigger an action

 

Look back at the actions of previous meetings and see how well you have done in implementing them. If they haven’t been implemented take some time to find out why – is there a pattern? Set up a meeting log to record future outcomes and check how well they have been followed.

There are several useful action tracking or project management apps such as Trello that you can use to manage actions visibly and collectively.

 

Discuss this with your team or at your next meeting

 

•	Use the continuous improvement questions above to conduct an audit of your meeting

•	Evaluate how well your decisions and actions have been implemented

•	Discuss any areas of improvement with the participants

•	Update the way you plan your meetings