Chapter 16 - Conclusions

If you have completed your actions and reached your target in each of the chapters of this book you will already have made a significant reduction in the number of meetings you attend and an improvement in the quality of those that remain.

•	Killing unnecessary meetings and topics and removing unnecessary participants can radically reduce the number and length of your meetings and slim down the number of people who attend. This is usually a win for everyone

•	More effective meeting planning enables you to make better use of your remaining meetings and focus them on delivering clear outcomes and higher levels of engagement

•	Effective facilitation of the meeting makes meetings more engaging to participate in and delivers clearer results faster

Here is an opportunity to go back to your original business case and see what kind of impact this has had on the time you spend in meetings and your satisfaction with them.

You may want to repeat any surveys you did at the beginning to collect this information. The opportunity in applying the ideas in this book is to save yourself a day per week of unnecessary meetings.

You should find a huge return on your investment in buying and reading this book. Meetings are expensive and the ideas in this book are inexpensive to apply, usually requiring no more investment than a bit of your time.

As we have seen, changing your meetings culture can seem like a relatively simple task but there is tremendous inertia and legacy expectation based on decades of poor quality meetings. There can also be corporate cultural assumptions that make meetings hard to escape from.

You may need to go back through the chapters of this book from time to time to prevent a slide back into poor meetings practice, or you may need to consider a broader company-wide program to drive out poor quality meetings.

Remember to use the continuous improvement questions in Chapter 12 to drive regular discussions on how you could improve your meetings even further.

If you need any further help with implementing these ideas through consulting, coaching, training your in-house facilitators, or online, webinar, or face-to-face training, our contact details are below.

The quality of meetings is within your control. If you do nothing you will continue to waste a day a week. Everyone else in your meetings is just as frustrated as you are.

All the value of the ideas in this book come from their implementation. We wish you luck with applying the ideas and would love to hear about your experiences.