Agendas are to meetings what eggs are to quiche. They are the binding agents, contributing structure and solidity. Yet, shockingly, around 63% of meetings don’t have a planned agenda.
So it’s unsurprising that 71% of senior managers in the US say meetings are inefficient and unproductive. Just like you wouldn’t waltz into IKEA without any idea of what you need to buy, you don’t enter a meeting without a list of topics to cover and a general goal of what you’d like to achieve at the end.
From in-person meetings to online business discussions, planning is essential if you want to avoid wasting time and resources. That’s why, at Innodirect, we aim to make online meetings more effective by encouraging our clients to set and stick to their agendas.
Break it down
As a group owner, your first step is to create your group title and description. Next, you’ll draw up a list of questions or topics you’d like to discuss with your selected group members. Questions reflect the goal of the discussion and aim to find a solution to an issue. Each question or topic is addressed on separate project boards, where participants can propose and discuss solutions, focusing on one issue at a time. There can be innumerable boards in a group, allowing members to pick and choose the subject they’re most interested in.
By breaking up the topic into separate discussion questions, group members are better able to focus on and engage with each issue, enriching discussions and making it much easier to stick to the agenda. And engagement and order aren’t the only benefits to moving your meetings online…
Keep it agile and relevant
It’s common for leaders to underestimate the amount of time needed to discuss an issue, especially if input is required from multiple members. Innodirect enables hundreds of users to participate in their discussions for weeks or even months at a time, meaning individuals can contribute whenever and wherever suits them.
Another benefit of holding a discussion on our platform is that comments are pre-moderated for relevance and discussions are facilitated. On each project, a facilitator is employed to help group members stick to the agenda by keeping discussions on-track and solution-focused.
Measure twice, cut once
Even though a facilitator helps discussions remain on-topic, it’s a well-planned agenda that forms the solid foundation for productive discussions. So how do you go about creating a concrete agenda to get the most out of your time on our platform? We’ve come up with three handy tips to get you started:
1. Decide on your main objectives/goals. Just as a regular, in-person meeting has a defined purpose, so too should your online ones. The purpose can be to share information, create plans or to make a decision on a specific issue. Whatever the intention of the project is, it’s important to have it in mind when taking the next steps.
2. Create a title for your group project. The title is generally the topic of your project and should reflect your intention or purpose. We suggest avoiding ambiguous or confusing language; “Improve Working Conditions” is simpler to understand than “Amelioration of Employee Environment”.
3. Once you’ve created the title of your project, you can begin to come up with the questions you’d like to address. This can be done by the group owner or it can be something to which all group members can contribute. A group owner can reach out to members, asking what they believe should be on the agenda, given the objectives of the project. Whichever way you choose to tackle question-generation it’s important to note that you will need to describe the context (the reasoning behind the question) and the possible paths of discussion (to provide group members with an example or a starting point from which to launch the discussion). You will also need to set out the goals each question is trying to achieve. For instance, if the goal of the project is to make a decision, you could state in the project information section of the platform that by the end of the session, you’d like to have reached a decision by consensus.
Questions should be:
a. Limited to one per board. Each project can have multiple different boards. Each board should ask only one question. For example, if a furniture manufacturer’s business reaches a new level of success but is unequipped to deal with the growing demand on their products, they could create a project titled “How to meet growing demand” and invite their employees and/or partners to the discussions. One board could ask: “Which of our processes are currently preventing us from meeting growing demand?” Another board could tackle the question: “How could we increase production to meet growing demands while keeping costs down?” Yet another could look at “What are the pros and cons of hiring more staff in order to meet increasing demand?”
b. To the point. If needed, project initiators can add a brief description under their question. Drawing from the example above, the question “What are the pros and cons of hiring more staff?” could be fleshed out further to indicate why hiring staff could help meet demand and which pros and cons are evident or have been mentioned in previous meetings. This gets the ball rolling on a discussion, as it provides group members with a starting point.
c. Unambiguous. Provide examples to help with comprehension and to instigate the discussion. You can mention how your competitors have dealt with the same issues, or how you used to address these kinds of concerns in the past and why it did or didn’t work.
d. Tailored to suit your intentions/goals. Note each of the example questions above contained the words “meet growing demand”, which is the overall goal of this discussion example.
e. Phrased as questions to intrigue your team members. When your agenda is ambiguous, colleagues can be left feeling confused. For instance, “What are the pros and cons of hiring more staff to meet increasing demand?” provides more clarity than if you just wrote “hiring staff”. That’s because a question helps provide context and boundaries to the discussion, encouraging team members to keep their own and others’ comments on-track. Once you’ve set your goals, created your title and composed your questions, it’s time to share it with your team and encourage their participation.
If you’re looking for tips on how to increase involvement in your online discussions, stay tuned to our next blog posts.
Want to know more about how to set and stick to an agenda with us?
Written by Kirsten Sokolovski