Scheduling a meeting. Oh God!!!! Save me.

Now a day, scheduling a meeting is one of most burdensome task in software industry in India. If you planned a meeting at (let’s say) 10:00 AM, 80% of the attendees will come at 10:15 AM or 10:30 AM. And for some of them, you have to bodily go to their seat (or call them) to join.

To resolve this commitment or attitude and time wastage problem, I decided to arrive before the scheduled start time. I encouraged other participants to get there early. I worked to become a meeting leader; and, when I became a leader, I demanded that people appear on time.

A meeting that doesn’t include the following characteristics is not likely to help your project or your team move forward:

1. It starts on time.
2. It ends on time or early.
3. You can leave the meeting if you are not needed.
4. Action items come out of the meeting.
5. The meeting has an agenda and minutes.

So the first agenda for all my meetings became “Hang around for people who turn up late”. All the agenda items in my agenda have durations.

So this agenda item looks like following:

1. Wait for people who arrive late. 10 minutes

Now, after seeing this agenda, I think some definite reactions would be:

1. Some participants will say that the agenda item started the meeting out on a sour note
2. Some participants will think starting late is unacceptable and they wanted to do something about it.
3. And definitely no reactions from most of the participants. They think it is nothing, just a joke of the day.

Publishing the names of the late arrivers in the meeting minutes is also a great idea. But this will again create a knotty situation for the team.

I think if the people who participate in a meeting can't cooperate to start their meeting on time, what chance is there they will cooperate to start a project on time? The same people who participate in meeting are the same people who are responsible for the tasks in a project.

I believe that a person who is not planning his things in a better way can’t join the meeting on time. Most of the time, people plan their schedule but not planning their schedule.

Does starting meetings on time truly matter? I believe it does. I read it somewhere that “If people are the organs of an organization, then meetings are the organization's lifeblood. The more healthy a meeting, the more healthy the organization. And, conversely, the sicker the meetings, the sicker the organization.”

In one of my earlier organization that I worked, we always started meeting on time. There were hardly some late attendees in the meeting. But one thing that was going on there. We started meeting at right time but the meeting ends late. I mean if the meting timings were 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM, it will start at 10:00 AM sharp but ends at 12:15 PM or 12:30 PM. Now what is going on here? Lack of agenda and lack of reformation of the discussions. Actually, what was happening that after the official discussions in the meeting, the team was discussing something else and 80% of times, they were discussing cricket. That is also not a good deal. That is the reason that agenda and end time is also very important.

Profitably starting the meeting with all of the participants required the cooperation of all the participants. If we are not planning our meeting timely and in a proper way, we are just playing in this IT industry and befooling ourselves.

-- Sanat Sharma