Working hard or hardly working? 8 steps to hold productive meetings

by Darlene A. Cunha Meetings are an inevitable part of every organization, but broken meetings are bad for business. Meetings can lead to productivity or frustration. Unfortunately, many of the meetings we attend leave us feeling like hamsters on a wheel playing catch up with the work we left behind. As healthcare continues to evolve, I find meetings take an increasing number of hours in the workday, and yet most employees regard them as a waste of time. In a 2012 survey conducted by Salary.com, U.S. professionals ranked meetings as the No. 1 office productivity killer. Bad meetings waste time, squash employee engagement and get in the way of what your organization's success. Ask yourself how many meetings you attended, either in person or virtually, and left the meeting feeling it was a waste of time? I can't tell you the number of times I disengaged from meetings because it was unorganized, and thus became preoccupied with the mountain of work I had on my desk. Recently I attended a meeting that dragged on and on. Everyone sat fiddling with his or her smartphone, and "Joe" from accounting hijacked the meeting for his own agenda. Almost everyone in the room was wondering the same thing: Why am I even here? This prompted me to revisit this topic. Whether you lead a meeting or attend one, the person assigned to run the meeting has a job to do: Engage the attendees and get results. Running a meeting is a skill most of us weren't trained in, but rather inherit as part o...
Source: hospital impact - Category: Health Managers Authors: Source Type: blogs