Running our calls on time

In his article Class bells Lynn Grant reminds us of the old good times when our classes in school ended with a bell, making sure we stop and move on to our next class in a timely fashion. Would not the bells be nice in many cases in our modern life when we are scheduled to attend multiple back to back meetings and calls throughout the day? Thanks for the fond memories and releavant association Lynn!

In the absence of bells a few more tricks/ideas may help run your calls/meetings in a more efficient manner:

• We tend to always block off the entire hour, even if a 15 minutes discussion should be sufficient. Go ahead, pick a suitable next meeting and schedule a shorter time slot for it.

• Yes, we are often more accustomed to start our meetings/calls 5 minutes past the official start time, allowing participants to switch from their previous call or walk from another meeting room. If you are the organizer, try allowing your meetings to end 5 minutes before the scheduled time.

• Time boxing a particular agenda item often helps.

• When using a WebEx, a GoToMeeting or other similar online meeting technology, making sure the online roster is correctly used/initialized by everyone dialing in helps save time at the start of the call going over the participants on the call, keeps people more engaged in the conversation because at any given time everyone can see who is talking and who is listening, and reduces time waste due to inevitable noise on the line (barking dogs, crying babies, music on hold) from an anonymous caller line.

• The rule of SEVEN, i.e. if you want your meeting to be a productive one where a decision can be made quickly, don't exceed 7 participants. Recent research by Bain & Company, published in the book "Decide & Deliver: 5 Steps to Breakthrough Performance in Your Organization" indicates that once you’ve got 7 people in a decision-making group, adding an additional member reduces decision effectiveness by 10%.  As a result, large groups rarely make any important decisions, at least not in a time efficient manner.

• Don't join every meeting or call, understand why your presence is needed and decline the invitation if you don't anticipate contributing to discussion.

• Excuse yourself from the meeting if you find yourself immersed in something else, reading or answering emails for example. Your departure will reduce participants count and may help run the meeting on time, and it will certainly help you focus better on what seemed to be your primary task.

• If nothing seems to help run your meetings on time, 2-3 minutes before the end time, announce you are leaving and hang up when the meeting time is over. The more people will do this the more we will run our meetings on time.