There are many different levels to improving meeting effectiveness, and too much improvement can be just as bad as too little. Depending where you are on your progress to meeting effectiveness, there are a number of different strategies you might take, and these pages are intended to give you some basic guidance on each.
Just starting out
If you are totally new to meeting effectiveness, and you have not thought too deeply about how your meetings need to be organised and structured to be effective (‘meetings just are’) then starting out need not be complicated. For guidance on some simple basics to get you started, please take a look at ‘Starting Out‘. Once you have mastered these principles, the meetings clinic is probably your next phase of improvement.
Using the Meetings Clinic
The meetings clinic is a comprehensive resource of best-practice tools and strategies for meeting improvement. It has two components – the Inspirometer side, and the public side.
- The Inspirometer side links to the ‘applies to’ flags you receive in your meeting feedback via the spider diagram at the bottom of the Meeting Stats page – this enables you to focus your improvement options to tools and strategies that specifically target any areas of weakness.
- The public side is a library of all sorts of tools and ideas you might use to improve your meetings (and to share with those who are not currently using Inspirometer).
For more information on this, please take a look at the guidance on the ‘Meetings Clinic‘
Meeting Effectiveness
Each of the strategies proposed by the meetings clinic has been designed as a simple straightforward remedy to a specific area of improvement in your meetings. But how do all of these elements come together?
Meeting Effectiveness is the more holistic programme of understanding within which each of the clinic strategies reside. Developing this understanding provides greater context and vision around your meetings and will help you to develop your own vision for how you want your future meetings to work.
Following a programme of improvement
As you involve your team in adopting the Inspirometer as part of a team/department/company wide programme of improvement, you may find the resources outlined in the ‘supporting implementation’ section helpful.