Meeting Related Documents

A meeting is a group communication in action around a defined agenda, at a set time, for an established duration. Meetings can be effective, ineffective, or a complete waste of time. If time is money and effectiveness and efficiency are your goals, then whether you arrange a meeting, lead a meeting, or participate in one, you want it to be worth your time.^[1]

Meetings can occur face-to-face, but increasingly business and industry are turning to teleconferencing and videoconferencing options. For instance, during the COVID-19 outbreak of 2020-2021, nearly all meetings went virtual.

Meeting Agenda

Regardless of how you come together as a team, group, or committee, you will need to define your purpose in advance with an agenda. The agenda is the plan for what you want to discuss and accomplish at the meeting. It is usually made up of a list of items, sometimes with a time frame for each item. A meeting also should have a chair (the person who keeps things on track) and a recorder (who records what happens and what decisions are made). The main parts of an agenda for a standard meeting are listed in Table 3: Meeting agenda elements.

For maximum effectiveness, agendas need to be distributed to all participants before the meeting, with enough time for people to respond and add items to the agenda that they feel are necessary. Even if agendas aren’t required in less formal team settings, they are often a good idea to implement, as they help make sure that meetings are productive.

Have you ever attended a group meeting only for it to take half an hour for anything productive to be done? Have you ever attended a meeting that began with no one being able to tell/decide what needs to be addressed? Agendas help prevent these scenarios, determine whether asynchronous meeting is necessary at all, and make sure that nothing is forgotten during the meeting.

Meeting Minutes

Minutes record what decisions were made and what important topics were discussed in a meeting. One person is responsible for recording the events of the meeting and distributing the minutes to each member, usually via email or a shared cloud folder. That way, no one should forget what tasks they agreed to complete and when. Minutes help projects stay on task. For instance, when all team members have a record of key decisions and discussion points, they do not need to repeat the same discussions at future meetings. In another example, if team members volunteer for a specific task during a meeting, creating and distributing minutes helps everyone involved remember what they are supposed to do.

Strategies for Effective Meetings

You want an efficient and effective meeting, but you should recognize that group communication can be chaotic and unpredictable. To stay on track, consider the following strategies in Table 4 and 5 below.

It may also be useful to consult a source like Robert’s Rules of Order to learn more about parliamentary procedure^[2]. Parliamentary procedure is a set of rules and procedures that organizations and groups can use to run meetings and make decisions.

Work Log

A work log is a common document used in the workplace to keep track of what work is done, by whom, and how long it took. A work log is helpful for keeping a team on track and ensuring equitable workloads. To ensure accountability, have each team member sign off on the work log.

Status Report or Status Update

Depending on the duration of a project, teams or individuals need to let stakeholders know about a project’s progress, status, and resource use. Stakeholders also need to know if and how any plans have changed. Sometimes these progress reports can be formal documents, such as those discussed in more detail in the chapter on Informational Reports. Other times, a status report or status update can be completed via a short memo, a relatively informal email, or a brief presentation in a meeting.

Gantt Chart or Task Schedule

Gantt charts are useful tools when planning complex and interdependent tasks. They are also useful for breaking larger tasks into subtasks. More complex Gantt charts may also indicate a team member’s task responsibility and other details. Gantt charts may be created by using Excel or Google Sheets, by using the table creation option in a word processor, or by using programs and software specifically intended for creating Gantt charts.

However, when working collaboratively, another option besides a Gantt chart is a task schedule, which also allows team members to plan tasks and their subtasks, as well as distribute responsibilities. Task schedules are often merely tables or checklists. Like work logs, task schedules also provide a way of marking when tasks are finished and of keeping track of levels of contribution of various individuals. This schedule should include all research and writing tasks for a project and might have overlapping due dates for subtasks belonging to various main tasks.

For instance, look at Table 6, which provides a sample of a task schedule section. This section breaks down conducting a survey into various subtasks and identifies which team member will complete each subtask. Note that this task schedule identifies numerical weights for each task. These contribution values indicate the relative difficulty, complexity, and time consumption of each task. Like the team charter, the task schedule is meant to be a living document that keeps every team member on the same page regarding internal deadlines, the responsibilities of team members, and how far the project has progressed.

Group Project Tip

One of the most common differences between school-teams and work-based teams is that school-based teams approach teamwork assuming that the most fair option is for each team member to contribute equally to the overall project. School-based teams are concerned about making the contribution weights for the team members add up to about equal. On the other hand, work-based teams rarely concern themselves with trying to make the work “equal.” Team members in the workplaces often have varying responsibilities outside of the team and varying areas of expertise. We aren’t pointing this distinction to say it is a bad thing to expect school teams to distribute the work equally, but to help you have clearer expectations when you move into working with teams in the workplace.