finance and operational meetings
DESCRIPTION
How you engage your team can dramatically change the quality of the outcome. I have lost count of the meetings that attempt to communicate and review what we are doing and how can we do it better. I am all for the process however the effectiveness often varies.TRANSCRIPT
Meeting Effectiveness
Andre Gien [email protected] www.gfbridge.com
We surveyed 30 companies comprising 365 meeting attendees producing interesting results.
How you engage your team can dramatically change the quality of the outcome
Meeting performance management
We then went down the path to determine what type of meeting are more effective. After some deliberation we came up with two meeting segments. 1.Operational meetings 2.Financial review meeting
How effective are your meetings
We often ignore the true cost of a meeting. There is the hard cost of the people attending that can be easily calculated in addition there is the soft cost of related to the lost productivity that is not produced during the duration that the people are in the meeting.
The cost of the meeting
How effective you make each meeting counts.
The next criteria we established was engagement and productivity. Engagement related to the degree of interest and productivity related to the outcome quality.
Second dimension
We surveyed 30 companies comprising 365 meeting attendees producing interesting results.
Operational meetings produced a more engaging audience with a diverse level of productiveness.
Finance review meetings on the other hand produced a lower level of engagement combined with a low level of effectiveness.
The survey
Degree of interest appears to be closely related to "What’s In It For Me" (WIFM) principal. The closer the meeting topic or agenda to the WIFM the higher degree of interest. What varied greatly was what motivated the WIFM within individuals groups and different businesses. Certain companies showed high motivation around meetings involving the "how to improve company performance" whilst others showed lower levels of WIFM within this topic.
Meetings and the WIFM principal
What was common within the WIFM category was when it came to "how we can make more money" be that in a form of profit sharing systems or any other form bonus schemes. These discussions always led to high interest involvement.
The common element -greed
We were not able identify any close relationships as to what drove the WIFM motivation. We did however come up with the following WIFM categories • Career advancement • Keeping my job (security)• Ability to make more money• Social
Motivation
High Interest
ProductiveWasteful
Low Interest
Operational meetings
Financial review meetings
The goal[high interest,
productive outcomes]
Meeting outcomes
There was (as you may expect) a direct relationship between level of interest and meeting productivity. What we expect was that high interest meetings would automatically lead to good quality outcomes. This was not the case, over 60% of high interest meetings lead to ineffective outcomes
The differential between finance meeting and operational meetings when it came to levels of interest was most distinctive. Finance meeting showed low levels of interest producing low levels of productivity or effectiveness.
The predominant reason that we could determine was due to understanding and relevance. Answers to questions in relation to finance meetings "was the information provided helped you to do perform your job function more effectively"
Score high impact on my job function to no change to what I do""was there anything you would do differently after the conclusion of the meeting"
Score from yes to no" did you comprehend the information that was provided in the meeting"
Score from high comprehension to low comprehension
Finance vs. Operational meeting
"would you like to have a better understanding of how companies financials statements work" Scored yes I would to not really Showed high results based on yes I would. Revealing that financial performance meetings can be transformed into high interest with greater education around how the financial statements work, what to look out for and how certain job functions can impact targeted results based on how financial performance are communicated.
The answer to
1.Consider the type of meeting that you are about
to hold2.Finance meetings can be productive if the
audience is well educated in the meeting content3.Consider the audience and what's in it for each
individual attendee 4.Less high productive meeting can produce better
results than frequent low interest low involvement meetings
In conclusion.
Andre Gien [email protected]
Passion for intuition powered by evidence encompasses what Andre is all about. . Delivering the financial statement acumen in the form of a story that aligns business thinking with measured outcomes transforms the way that manages create value. The process of the financial statement story has been converted in a discipline that has been deployed by over 150 different companies. Andre's favorite quote "if you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change" is so true not only to financial statements but to everything in life.