The resources and guidance provided through the clinic are organised into ten key aspects of meeting effectiveness:
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Purpose (Clarity of aims and approach)
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Attendance (Right people, right times, ready)
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Progress (Achievement between meetings)
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Leadership (Guidance and facilitation)
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Creativity (Generating ideas and insights)
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Tools (Making use of best-practice)
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Listening (Involvement and understanding)
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Commitment (Ownership of outcomes/actions)
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Efficiency (Speed and quality of progress)
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Facilities (Rooms, technology and support)
Each contains a wealth of best-practice strategies and ideas to improve effectiveness in that area of the meeting. These are generally fairly short, and are intended to be relatively easy to implement.
If comment flags have been enabled for your account, these can be included in the feedback and will create a spider diagram showing the average feedback concerned with that aspect of meeting effectiveness, and the strength of opinion (the proportion of feedback in that area).
If they have not, then deciding your focus is more likely to be a matter of sifting through the comments, and/or discussion with your participants. You may find the following steps helpful:
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Check to see if the feedback includes comments (or flags) which provide an indication of areas for improvement.
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Look at the meeting stats to see if there is a correlation between feedback and certain types of meetings.
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Use the feedback to start a dialogue with meeting attendees, drawing out their proposed areas for improvement.
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Use the meetings clinic to highlight possible strategies to improve these areas.
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Pick on a few easy improvements to begin with. Discuss them with the meeting to develop shared ownership.
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If you are lacking any of the basic meeting disciplines, now is the time to ensure that they are in place.
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Track the improvement in people’s feedback. Ensure attendees understand the importance of this.
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When one improvement is made, use the feedback and further dialogue to work on the next one.
The clinic is accessed through the meeting stats page. Toward the bottom right of the Meeting Stats there is a panel which is represented either as a drop-down list of the aspects you may wish to improve, or a spider diagram of current feedback against those aspects (depending on whether comment flags have been enabled – see section above).
Clicking on an aspect of meeting effectiveness will open up the clinic on that aspect.
Some of the clinic resources are also accessible through the
help pages.
The clinic opens up in the form of the page on the right. At the top of the page is an explanation of why that particular aspect is key to meeting effectiveness, and in the bottom half of the page are a selection of strategies aimed at improving that particular aspect.
Between the two is a set of filters which can be used to narrow down the selection of strategies to ones concerning a specific area of meeting improvement – these are colour coded, and if selected will show only those strategies which relate (e.g. are of the same colour).
Clicking a particular strategy will open a pop-up box with more information.
The selected strategy is explained briefly and clearly in separate tabs within the pop-up box.
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The first tab concerns the aims of that particular strategy – what it is seeking to do.
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The second tab concerns the benefits arising from implementing the strategy effectively – these are what you should seek to achieve as a result, and the means of evaluating whether it has worked.
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The third tab outlines a proposed approach to implementing the strategy, and is intended more as a dotted-line to keep in view than as a prescriptive set of rules.
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The fourth tab provides links to related documents on the web. In many cases these link to documents on the public pages of the clinic (see below) and provide resources to help you implement your strategy.
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The fifth tab provides the option to print out the advice contained in the preceding sections.
The public clinic provides an open resource to all people who would like to improve the effectiveness of their meetings.
It is organised according to the 10 aspects defined in ‘structure of the meetings clinic’ above, but accesses these through a drop-down list in the right hand menu.
The meetings clinic is a set of resources ranging from basic meeting disciplines through to best practice which people can quickly and easily adapt and adopt into their meetings.