Do you ever find it a problem to get the correct attendees
to show up for scheduled meetings on time?
Lack of proper attendance and attention from the very start
of meetings can drastically reduce the importance, quality and impact of
meetings held for the intended purpose of instilling that very intention.
So what’s the answer?
Here’s a couple of methods I have used over the years:
The first method
I would recommend you utilize to garner attention was humor. Humor is easy to
find; it’s laying around everywhere you look.
You have to be careful with humor and insure it fits the
situation and the group. Having crossed that hurdle, get with it.
I had been brought in to facilitate the installation of a
manufacturing software package—migrating from a home-grown (with so many
patches, you never knew from one day to the next that everything was working as
intended) to an off-the-shelf system with all the bells and whistles available
at the time. There were various levels of support for the upgrade at every
level of management in the organization; making the task even harder. This fact
alone permeated the organization and made scheduling and conducting the
planning and training meetings a real chore.
I had to find a way around the lack of attendance,
attraction and attention. I chose humor.
Each morning after arrival at the plant, I would scour the
paper for the best cartoon or funny paper tri-toon and alter the captions to
fit a situation of plant interest—always humorous and never harmful. It didn’t
take long for the word to get around and soon attendance began to pick up.
Initially, I added the toon at the rear of the meeting subject matter being
discussed and initially the attendees waited to the appropriate point in time
to flip over to that last page to obtain their comic relief. I later found that
the members of management were sharing the toon with their department and
section personnel—the following began to grow. The Fareside was my favorite toon to modify at the time but Hagar the Horrible, Dilbert, Peanuts and Beetle Bailey work very well also. For
copy write infringement reasons I will avoid putting one up here.
I realized that trouble was afoot when everybody, just as
soon as the meeting agenda and subject matter was passed out, began flipping to
the back page to get their jolly just as soon as they received their paper. I
had to shift the toon somehow.
The guys in my department that assisted with the assembling
of the training material helped my interleaf the toon into different places
within the different handouts. This worked for awhile—I had asked up front in
the meeting that they not search for the toon, but wait and come upon it as it
eventually showed up. This worked for short period of time.
After maybe three days, just as soon as the handouts were
sent down each side of the conference table, there began the loudest shuffling
of paper one can imagine—everybody searching for the toon. I should have known
this was the next evolution of where we were headed. I had actually picked the
exact wrong subject to humorize for the last several days—the proposition that
the entire factory would soon be required to wear smocks both on the work floor
and in the office areas—although an idea promulgated by the Group VP; it was
not well received at any level of the organization. The sole supporter was the
laundry service that supplied smocks to those uniform renters that had
previously selected to wear them.
The humor idea had run it’s course and I found another
method quickly. The smock idea, by-the-way, was never implemented.
The second method
I have used successfully is to employ tactics that encourages early arrival.
Those arriving early are rewarded in some small way with a reward befitting the
situation. The reward can range from candy to the latest company T-shirt. Keep
in mind here that those arriving too early should be eliminated from the
competition—too early may indicate another problem that management needs to address;
why else would they be there?
One method to insure that
everybody is on time that I have always liked is some sort of trivia contest. I
really like the gathering of short—often obscure—quotations and having the
early arrivers venture guesses who the author is. The more thought provoking
and the older the quotation the better in my opinion—especially when the author
is mostly know for logic 180º in the opposite direction.
Here’s an example of two I used before a meeting about six
years back:
(1) “What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No
smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a
year. It grows—it must grow; nothing can prevent it. It must grow downward or
upward; it must grow smaller or larger, better or worse—it cannot stand still.
In other words, we change—and must change, constantly, and keep on changing as
long as we live. Who is the really constant man? The man who changes. Since
change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.”
(2) “Technological progress is not merely an accomplishment
of capitalism, but a vital ingredient. Business must innovate, invent, and
experiment if it is to survive; the business that rests content on its past
achievements is not long for this enterprising world.”
The prime idea to keep in mind is to move into the meeting
agenda as soon as it is appropriate to do so. Remember my rules on meetings:
(1) never longer than one hour and (2) always provide an agenda in advance.
The additional attractors and attention-getters are for one
reason and one reason only: Getting attentive players to the meeting on time.
Never let the extras lag on into the meeting time.
Oh yah. Just who were the two authors involved in the quotes
(opinions) stated above? Both opinions were first seen by the public way over
100 years ago just as applicable today as they were when first uttered. Most of
the guesses I would receive from those early-attendees were never in the
correct century and all early-attendees were routinely amazed at the windage
adjustment required to even hit close.
(1) Mark Twain, “Consistency”, a
paper read at the Hartford Monday Evening Club, following the Blaine-Cleveland
campaign, 1884, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, Da Capo Press, 1963, p. 577
(2) Taken from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital published first in 1865 excerpted from Robert L.
Heilbroner, “The Worldly Philosophers – The Lives, Times & Ideas of the
Great Economic Thinkers”, Simon and Schuster, Inc. 1953, p 138.
Give either of these two approaches a try if you experience
an attendance or attention problem. Remember to stay between the lines and
appropriate!
