A follow-up to the previous meeting-related post: “12 Tips to Run More Effective Meetings.”
Working for a Client Engagement Agency (CEA) like Quaero affords the opportunity to serve an array of clients across multiple industries. While this exposure certainly has benefits living within diversity, it can lead to a number of key challenges when working across clients. One such obstacle is the occurence of back-to-back meetings with differing clients. While there is no panacea, the following list of Best Practices can help maintain overall Meeting Hygiene as it relates to single and multi-client environments.
With the steps to effective meeting preparation already in hand (see post) the challenge becomes how to shift topics, verbiage, and focus from one client to the next. While diligent practice can help make any employee a “Master of Disguise,” able to blend into any client engagement, the steps below help ease the transition between meetings.
- Take Breaks Between Meetings – Though there are times when back-to-back meetings are unavoidable, where possible, try to schedule breaks between meetings to grab water, make a trip to the restroom, and refocus. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to end meetings 5-10 minutes earlier (e.g. end a meeting at 10:55 am rather than 11:00 am) since it is often easier to end a meeting at an unconventional time than it is to start one at an unconventional time.
- Budget Time for Transitions – Be sure to allow for enough time to handle logistics between client meetings (e.g. moving to the next conference room, staging meeting assets, and re-organizing presentation privileges on meeting software).
- Take Diligent Notes – During meetings, be sure to take diligent notes (or assign a Recorder to do so) and save the drafts until there is time to review, finalize, and disseminate to the larger team.
- Avoid Cross-Chatter – Whether in a conference room or on a conference call, prevent meetings from conjoining. In a conference room, this means that a second meeting’s attendees should wait outside of the room until the first meeting ends. In a conference call, this means that preferences should be configured to place a second meeting’s attendees in a “lobby/waiting room” until the first meeting ends.
- Introduce Meeting Attendees and the Scope – Introducing all attendees not only sets the stage for the expected level of discussion and decision making expected, but it also buys the Facilitator time to adjust to a different client.
While meeting applications vary in terms of feature availability and complexity, there is typically a way to prevent back-to-back meetings from conjoining. For those using Microsoft Lync, the instructions below illustrate how to execute this process, by defaulting all attendees to the “Waiting Room” until the Facilitator “Admits” them to the call:
1. Create a new Lync Meeting
2. Select “Meeting Options”
3. Navigate to the “Access and Presenters” sub-menu.
4. Click the “Customize access and presenters for this meeting” option and select “Organizer only (locked)” to place everyone but the meeting organizer on hold when they dial-in.
