The document provides best practices for effective meetings. It recommends that meetings have clear goals and include only necessary attendees. An agenda with time allotted for each item and assigned owners should be created. Attendees must prepare and meetings must start and end on time while sticking to the agenda. Notes, minutes, decisions and action items should be recorded. Recurring meetings must be periodically reviewed for necessity. The document emphasizes the importance of saving meeting information to prevent loss of knowledge and opportunities. It suggests using meeting management software like Wizergos to easily store and access this information.

1. Best Practices for Meetings
Shibabrata Mondal
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2. Why do we need Meetings?
● Face to face communication
○ Non-verbal Clues
○ Building Relationships
● Efficient
● Participative
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3. Data on Meeting Productivity
● More than $37 Billion is spent each year on unproductive
meetings
● Organizations spend 15% of their collective time in
meetings
○ Middle managers spend 35% of their time in meetings
○ Upper management spends 50% of their time in meetings
● Executives consider 67% of meetings to be failure
(source: https://www.themuse.com/advice/how-much-time-do-we-spend-in-meetings-hint-its-scary)
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4. Alternatives: you may not need a meeting
● When sharing hard data that does not need any
discussions
● For status meetings (specially the FYI kind)
● Announcements that are not accompanied by an
interactive Q&A
● Consensus building: try informal one-on-one discussions
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5. Goal of the meeting
● Make sure the meeting is goal oriented
● Write down the title or subject of the meeting
as a goal
○ Bad example: discuss IO performance issues
○ Good example: Come up with a plan to address the
IO performance issues
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6. Who should attend
● Make sure to invite only the people needed for the
meeting
● Be mindful to not miss anyone
○ Who is a key stakeholder or decision maker
○ Whose input is needed for important decision making in the
meeting
○ Who needed to be heard for successful execution of the
decisions
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7. Come up with Agenda
● Try to write agenda items also as goals wherever possible
○ Bad example: discuss the compensation plan for internship
program
○ Good example: choose the compensation plan for internship
program
● Make sure each agenda item has an owner who will drive
the agenda item during the meeting
● Make sure to add a time budget for each agenda item if
there are multiple agenda items for a meeting
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8. Preparation before meeting
● All attendees must be well prepared for the
meeting before the meeting starts
● In case everyone needed does not come to
the meeting prepared (in some cases) it might
be prudent to cancel and reschedule the
meeting
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9. Time Management
● Punctuality: start on time; end on time
○ Don’t repeat for late comers
● Stick to the agenda
● Cull any off topic discussions that does not add
value to the goal of this meeting
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10. Notes and Minutes
Take copious notes
Write down meeting minutes
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11. Decisions
Record all decisions made in the meeting
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12. Action Items
Write down Action Items with Assignee and
due date
Review Action Items from previous meetings
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13. Review Recurrence
● All recurring meetings must be reviewed
periodically for continuance
○ Daily or weekly meetings review quarterly
○ Monthly or quarterly meetings review yearly
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14. Where is all the Information?
● Meeting Agenda, Minutes, Notes, Action Items contain
valuable information and knowledge
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15. Information Loss
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Opportunity cost for revenue exceeds $15 million annually
for an organization of 1000 knowledge workers
(source: IDC report: The High Cost of Not Finding Information)

16. Act Now: Save and publish all data
● Information is the currency of the modern economy
● Do yourself a favour: save all these information in an
easily searchable format for your current and future
employees
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17. What next?
Try Wizergos Meeting Management Software
Sign up at: www.wizergos.com
For more information: info@wizergos.com
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