Productive and Effective Meetings

  • Are facilitated and use public scribing.
  • Are structured and focused with an agenda. Agenda items are identified as to the purpose of the item (discussion, dialogue, information sharing, etc.). Each agenda item has a desired outcome and a process to reach each outcome.
  • Use roles as needed (facilitator, timekeeper, public scribe, agreement checker, summarizer, etc.).
  • Use a variety of strategies (partner talks, structured go-arounds, brainstorming, round robin writing, structured solution seeking strategies, etc.) to promote active engagement of all meeting participants.
  • Pay attention to the seven norms of productive teaming and meeting and other collaborative norms the team identifies.
  • Assess the overall effectiveness and satisfaction of the meeting.
  • End the meeting with "who is going to do what by when", identify who else needs information about this meeting and establishing date, time, location, and agenda items for the next meeting.

Characteristics of Effective Teams:
PIGS-Face

Positive Interdependence: "We are in this together."

  • Articulated and shared goals
  • Team norms/groundrules/agreements
  • Shared leadership and decision making:
    • Rotating roles, sharing of resources, and division of labor
    • Multiple decision making strategies promoting consensus rather than voting

Individual Accountability: "I'm responsible."

  • Commitment to team goals and norms.
  • Use of roles.
  • Commitment to working through conflicts.
  • Offering and asking for support.
  • Using agenda building formats and responsibility matrixes.

Group Processing: "How are we doing?"

  • Regularly gathering information about how the team is accomplishing its goals and how people are with working with each other as framed by the ground rules, norms, etc. Based on the gathered information team celebrates successes and identifies areas in need of improvement.

Social Skills/collaborative norms: "We can work it out."

  • Establish team norms, practice the seven norms of productive meeting behaviors as well as other collaborative behaviors the team identifies (i.e. summarizing, agreement checking, process observing, and conflict resolution).

Face to Face Interaction:

  • Establish regular meeting dates and times.
  • Start and end on time.
  • Take and share action minutes.
  • Provide for privacy, comfort and confidentiality.