In today’s world where everybody is working from home due to COVID meetings are getting even more important. Everyone is working at their own home. Therefor meetings are the only way to connect and have discussing in times like these.

In this blog post I am writing about the five golden rules I find most important. I have collected them over the years working in the IT industry as a software engineer.

#1 Agenda

When thinking about creating a meeting the first thing you should think about is the agenda and therefor also the goal the meeting should solve. It is best to create a list of bullet points which should be discussed during the meeting.

Once you have got formed your agenda, please feel free to include your bullet points also in the meeting invite. This is going to help other attendees of the meeting to give them a glimpse about what the meeting is about. Also it gives them the ability to prepare information in advance which might help to contribute to the meeting.

Having an agenda also helps during the meeting itself. You can view it like a checklist where you can go from point A to point B and then C.

#2 Attendees

Another important point are the attendees which are invited to the meeting. People often forget time is money. And so if there is a meeting and half of the crew does not feel they belong in the meeting it is a complete waste of money.

Implementing a meeting culture where people can leave the meeting if they can not add any value to the meeting is really important.

So next time when scheduling a meeting double check if you think everybody you invited has to be in the meeting. You also can politely tell them at the start of the meeting that everybody can leave the meeting if they feel so.

#3 Moderation

When the meeting starts there has to be someone who is going to moderate the meeting. The first task is to introduce why the meeting was set up in the first place and what the goal of the meeting is about. The next step is to introduce new attendees so everybody knows everyone’s role.

Now after the introduction is completed, the meeting itself can start.

During the meeting you still want to keep an eye on the agenda as the discussion might drift in another direction. Once you notice a situation like this you might politely ask the attendees if this is going add value to the core meeting goal. If it does not add any value, or the discussion would blast the scope of the current meeting, I highly suggest to move back to the bullet points.

#4 Meeting notes

During the meeting it is best to assign someone the role who writes down the meeting notes. It often happens that you need to look up information which was discussed in a special meeting. When having meeting notes in place you can easily search for the information you are looking for.

In general meeting notes should consist of the following points:

Attendees
Meeting date
Goals
Action points

If you are disciplined and fill out all the information I just listed above, it is fairly easy to come back once you need the information again.

Another positive aspect about meeting notes is action points which I am going to discuss in the next rule.

#5 Follow up action points

Action points are a helpful tool to split up the required work which has to be done after the meeting and also helps to keep people accountable.

When having multiple follow up actions which need to be completed and you want to split them up just ask the attendees “Who wants to take up this specific task?”. In most cases someone is going to raise their hands. You then can can simply tag them if you are eg. using Confluence or Notion. By doing this the assigned person also gets a notification on their end, so they do not forget the have got an open assignment.

Recap

If you follow these five golden rules, I can guarantee you the quality of your meetings is going to increase rapidly. To sum things up. The five most points are as following:

An Agenda gives the attendees a glimpse of what the meeting is about. They can therefor prepare information in advance. It may also help as checklist during the meeting
Be careful when selecting the Attendees list. Not everybody has to be in the meeting. In addition to that you might want to implement an open meeting culture. People should be able to leave the meeting if they can not add any value.
Have some sort of Moderation so the meeting discussion is not going to drift in another direction.
Take Meeting notes and label them. By doing this you and your co-workers can come back at anytime in the future if you need to.
Create meaningful Follow up actions and assign them to a person and keep them accountable.

The five golden rules for successful meetings