Dilemma. You have a departmental meeting at 2pm. It is now 1pm and despite 4 cups of coffee, you are still hanging like Indiana Jones on the edge of a project deadline. You aren't really needed at the meeting, but you don't need the headache of explaining to the boss why you didn't show up.
Solution. Your company uses wiki meeting?s. You log into the meeting, provide your feedback on the 4 proposals, upload your monthly report and sign off with thanks to all. Time elapsed: 15 minutes. - now you can get back to the urgent tasks that need you.
...split...
Meetings and team communication are an essential component of doing business, and until we all have wires plugged into the back of our heads, sharing information successfully is always going to be a challenge. Is your organization using meetings effectively?
The four basic functions of a meeting:
Being at a meeting generally requires that you stop doing everything else and pay full attention. A good knowledge management plan should help prevent careless mistakes making important information held privately by individuals or departments public information to the other departments or everyone with a need to know. Being at the meeting provides accountability - because everyone was there, and everyone can be held responsible for knowing any information that was shared in the meeting.
2. Decision making and coordinating.
Meetings are used to collect group preferences and input into decision making, and coordinating tasks that multiple people or teams participate in.
3. Discovering unknown unknowns.
Good meetings push people into thinking about things they haven't thought about before or included in the plan. For example at a meeting somebody might discover that a critical aspect of a project has not been scoped out, or the existence of a possibility for a windfall gain that no-one was planning for.
4. Team Building
Face to face interactions (provided they are not primarily about conflicts) are useful to building trust and cohesion, being the animals that we are, having the use of all five of our senses makes it easier to bond and build relationships that will be useful in future collaboration.
How wiki can make a difference:
Primarily wiki meetings help with functions 1 and 2 of the meeting process. Our Recommendation is to successfully implement a wiki meeting system, groups can set a target to reduce meeting time spent on functions 1 and 2 by up to 90%, doing so will free up more time for functions 3 and 4, which you can try to increase by 50%. Doing both of these successfully can both increase the quality of your meetings and decrease the total amount of time spent on meeting processes.
The Wiki Meeting Advantage
1. Don't wait in line to get your information,
Using wiki meetings can substantially reduce the time required to feed information to a group. This is mainly because wiki meetings are asynchronous communication?, so people don't have to wait in line to give or receive information. Everyone can go directly to the parts of the meeting that concern them and have their say. Information can be conveyed, and in the process everyone who contributes a comment proves that they have received the information. Wiki meetings also provide strong accountability and transparency. Using the history function, it is easy to see who showed up, who didn't, who said what and when.
2. Decide continuously.
Using wiki meetings, decisions can be made and updated all the time - you don't have to get everyone together to provide feedback or vote on a motion. In a wiki, each participant can record multiple votes, either by editing the page directly, using polling tools, or creating surveys on the fly with multiple questions.
3. Have permanent records - and know where they are.
Using wiki as a knowledge management system helps ensure that information does not get lost. As soon as one member types information into a wiki meeting agenda, it is permanently, accessibly, and securely stored in a database which is accessible 24/7/365 from anywhere by anyone with the appropriate permissions.
Do you have a need to make your meetings flow more effectively? Contact us and we can help.
For more about how wiki based intranets can save your time. See Online Office?
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