In the event that a procedure or product does not meet the standard for more than a specified number of times, it is considered inefficient and needs to be improved.

So How Does Cosapien Enable Six Sigma Practices?

Cosapien allows the purpose of the meeting series to be captured and, by default, all meetings are considered to be part of a series.

One of Cosapien’s major features is that it enables tasks to be created from the decisions that are taken at meetings immediately.

Its task management capability is integrated with quality control mechanisms:

• Each task request is show on at least two peoples’ radar outside the meeting, along with a due date and the ability to raise early warnings for the tasks that may not be completed in time
• Progress on tasks is auto-minuted in meetings for continuity
• Each task that is completed is reviewed

An employee doesn’t need to read the meeting minutes to know what their tasks are. Cosapien shows these to employees and attendees in summary form.

Six Sigma Practices And Meeting Management

Meetings are integral to Six Sigma but, as we all know, badly managed meetings are time-wasters (more on this here).

How does six sigma training enable organisations to run more effective meetings?

Team Grouping

Six Sigma recommends that groups are created based on participants’ certifications. An accurate grouping would be made up of a team of green belts that is led by a black belt. The black belt would be guided by a black belt master as when required during a project.

Effective Tools

Six Sigma encourages team leaders to empower their team members by providing the tools they need to participate effectively in a meeting. The meeting agenda should be prepared and distributed in advance to enable people to prepare.

Feedback Mechanisms

Six Sigma black belts should liaise with green belts, to gauge their feedback on the meeting’s efficiency.

Interested in using Cosapien to complement your team’s training in Six Sigma? Get an invite below.

The post How To Use Cosapien To Enable Six Sigma Practices appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Set A Clear Purpose For The Meeting

In order to ensure that all attendees are adequately prepared and can thus contribute to the meeting, everyone needs to understand the meeting’s purpose.

Give Everyone Sufficient Notice

Empower the meeting attendees by letting them know about the meeting well in advance. Send a reminder about the meeting a day or two beforehand.

Select Key People Only

Only invite people whose attendance is essential to the purpose of the meeting.

Create An Agenda And Send It Out In Advance

Use Cosapien to email a meeting’s agenda to all participants, as well as those tasks whose will be determined by the outcome of the meetings.

Scott Thor recommends that sticking to five primary agenda items can help keep a meeting focused:

• Introduction to the project
• Lean Six Sigma (LSS) overview
• Project charter agreement
• Actionable items
• Meeting cadence

Once your agenda is captured in Cosapien’s meeting management interface, it can be used as the basis for the minutes.

Once set, the meeting chair should ensure the agenda is followed. This is essential for keeping the meeting purpose-driven and ensuring it is wrapped up on time.

Be Punctual And Start The Meeting On Time

You need to start on time to finish on time. Don’t spend too long on one particular agenda item, at the risk of the rest of the list. If you can summarise an agenda point, do so and move on. (Tip: put the intended duration as part of each agenda heading, this will help run meetings according to their time commitment.)

State The Purpose Of The Meeting At The Beginning

Remind the attendees what the objective of the meeting is to keep everyone on track and to ensure members understand what their contributions are. Do not allow anyone to deviate from the agenda items.

Take Accurate Meeting Minutes

Cosapien makes it easy to capture decisions, action items and due dates, so that the meeting chair can contribute freely to the meeting discussions.

The minutes should be shown to everyone present before the end of the meeting. They should also be distributed to all meeting attendees as soon as possible after the meeting is concluded. Cosapien makes this easy, as it automatically distributes the minutes to all attendees and the distribution list upon publishing.

Manage Different Behaviour Patterns

Invite feedback from introverted team members and limit those who speak too much.

Conflicts can be mitigated if certain guidelines are established beforehand. Ensure that all tasks are clear and understood by the people who they are requested of.

Want to try it out? Sign up below and get your invite to Cosapien.

The post Use Cosapien And Six Sigma To Run More Productive Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

What do you want to achieve?

Define a clear purpose. Meetings with a clear purpose is more likely to be effective, and more likely to be attended. (Cosapien allows you to capture the purpose for every meeting series.)

Send out the purpose, along with the invite and agenda. Repeat the purpose at the start of the meeting.

Should your meeting become side-tracked, the purpose allows you to easily steer it back on course.

How necessary is this meeting?

Is the meeting necessary at all? It might sound crazy, but many things can get done without a meeting, and this is one of the most useful productivity tips you can master. (If it can be done without a meeting, it is oft best done without a meeting.) Take the time to consider whether there are other ways to achieve your purpose.

It is often a good idea to check with your superior that they agree that your purpose is important and aligned with the needs of the company. This serves the double purpose of also aligning your work with what your superior considers to be important.

Constrain the meeting

Determine the absolute minimum amount of people needed to achieve your purpose. Only these people should be invited to the meeting. Everyone else who is important, but not critical should be on the distribution list. Check for overlap. Ie, if there are two people with largely overlapping skill then only 1 of them need to be in the meeting.

A key piece is that attendees need to have the mandate to make/approve the decisions to be taken in the meeting. Sometimes a key decision maker will want to send a representative to the meeting. Only allow fully empowered representatives. Otherwise, decisions taken will constantly be reversed. If that is not possible, run the meetings without the representative, put the key decision maker on the distribution list, and give a task to a person in the meeting to get approval on certain decisions before the next meeting.

Determine the absolute minimum amount of time needed to achieve your purpose. Add time allocations to agenda item titles, e.g., “Opening (5 min)”. This will help keep a tight schedule, and also helps people understand the weighting of the different sections.

This combination of attendees (per hour rate) and time constraints allows you to measure the cost of your meeting. You can measure the RoI by reflecting that against the purpose of the meeting.

Constraining increases the effectiveness of meetings by

• Makes conversations quicker, and more easily kept on point
• Minimises cost to company

Come prepared

Pre-minute the meeting:

• It prepares the chair better for their meeting.
• This is especially important if the chair is also the scribe, as it minimises interruptions.

Bonus tip: Ask the person responsible for each section to mail the scribe their pre-minuted section before the meeting (including presentations, reports, etc for attachment).

Before the Meeting

• Follow-up on overdue tasks before the meeting. Ie, remind attendees of overdue tasks, and that you expect to see them addressed before the meeting.
• Send the agenda out before hand. This way all parties know what the meeting will entail, and can better prepare for the meeting.

Bonus tip: Introverts perform better when they can prepare for a meeting (ie, send out the agenda at least 24h in advance).

Develop a rhythm, ie, “this is how it is done”

Have a regular cadence for meetings. Greater productivity will result if a meeting is held at a set interval (e.g., weekly) with clear expectations of each person on what they will be reporting on each time (e.g., pipeline report and all experiments ran) with the questions that will be asked (e.g., what did you learn).

Send a clear and consistent message on expectations that before meetings the tasks either be completed or that new deadlines be agreed. (Both of which can be easily done in Cosapien.)

Minute all key decision and discussions. Do this in the 3rd person so that minutes are easily read in future. Minute as if you have no insider knowledge of the meeting, so that it can be understood in 3 months. As people change on your project, these discussions and decisions will be critical to avoid scope creep, and to maintain focus (ie, avoid wasting time on rehashing past decisions). Bonus tip: Include assumptions and reasoning in decisions, so that they make sense when revisiting them

Send the minutes out to all attendees and distributees as soon as possible after the meeting. (Cosapien automatically does this for you, as soon as you publish the meeting minutes.) This way attendees receive the minutes with their tasks while the meeting is still fresh in their minds.

Follow-up after minutes are sent out that everyone agrees to do the tasks captured in the minutes. (Integrated into Cosapien, as it splits out all task request from minutes into individual requests.) Otherwise, people arrive at the next meeting claiming that the scribe captured the task wrongly or that they didn’t know about it.

The productivity tips above will help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings. Interested in using Cosapien to help you execute on those tips? Join here.

The post Productivity Tips For Minuting Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

And while face-to-face meetings do still have a lot of value, virtual meetings are a major time-saver, particularly in cities where congested traffic can turn a one-hour meeting into a three-hour foray out of the office.

Even if you don’t want to throw your boardroom table out, learning the rules for conducting virtual meetings can be really valuable, especially during times where you need a great deal of input, need to meet with people who are physically far away or are simply pressed for time.

Here are five techniques to help you hold effective meetings and get everyone on the same page, even if they’re not sitting around the same table.

Establish Clear Rules Of Engagement

In order to hold a focused, outcomes-based meeting, the attendees need to be physically and mentally present. You may not need a boardroom but the environment in which the attendees physically find themselves should be conducive to full participation.

That means background noise and distractions should be filtered out and the person should be able to concentrate fully on the discussion at hand.

Control The Meeting

Use Cosapien to pre-minute the meeting so everyone knows what agenda items should be discussed. Direct questions using names so there’s no confusion about who is being addressed.

If you find certain people are not engaging in an expected manner, bridge the conversation by redirecting it to the person who is responsible for the agenda item.

Nurture Two-Way Communication

Whether you are doing a voice or video meeting, the meeting should be structured so that the communication is not entirely one-sided. This is where video interaction can provide value, because without being able to see expressions and read body language, communication may be less effective.

Chats and hang-outs can be equally useful, as you can request input from a lot of people and have them all provide it simultaneously.

Cosapien is built around social contracts and feedback mechanisms so it is not all left up to the meeting chair or the person who is speaking. The system has been engineered so that the outcomes of a meeting are co-created by everyone who participates in it.

Don’t Feel Awkward About Silences

It is likely that you will experience those moments of silence and the flow of the meeting may seem interrupted. This doesn’t mean you need to fill the silence or introduce something new for the moment to pass. It is more likely to mean that the rest of the participants are still absorbing it and need a few moments to process it.

Let Virtual Meetings Bridge The Gaps

There will come a time when you have no option other than a virtual meeting. Maybe you acquire a new client in a different part of the world. Perhaps your star sales person is in another city. Whatever the reason, you can use virtual meetings to bridge geographical and cultural gaps.

Make it fun; create value for the participants by monopolising on the positives of the channel you are communicating on.

In summary

Running virtual meetings is an essential skill for busy people. Our five tips for virtual meetings include:

1. Attendees should be in an appropriate environment that is relatively noise-free
2. Control the meeting so everyone knows what they need to speak about, and when a response is expected.
3. Ensure two –way communication so that it is clear all instructions and outcomes are understood. Use Cosapien to take accurate meeting minutes and follow-up tasks.
4. Embrace the silent periods. Sometimes people need a minute or two to digest what has been said.
5. Make it fun and enjoyable for everyone.

Cosapien is a meeting minuting and task management tool that can help you to hold effective virtual meetings. Keep everyone on the same page; get your invite to Cosapien below.

The post Make Virtual Meetings More Productive With These 5 Tips appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

So, how do you make those introductions and confirm those meetings?

Know Your Place

Yes, an element of humility should be exercised. Don’t assume someone wants or needs to meet with you. Your pitch or first attempt at contact should motivate exactly how you can justify taking up someone’s valuable time. In other words: prove your value and exactly what you are putting on the table.

This relates as much to what you say, as to how you say it.

Artful Language Manipulation And Time Management

In the 4-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss acknowledges that sometimes, just getting through to the person can be a challenge.  It’s easy for a prospect to ignore emails when you don’t know him or her.

Sometimes the new contact you want to make is guarded by a PA or a secretary, who has been tasked with ensuring the executive’s expensive time isn’t wasted.

He recommends making phone calls early in the morning and after the work day has ended as this is often the easiest way to get past the “gate-keeper” and speak to the person directly. Once you have got through, use a respectful address, introduce the reason for your call and tell them immediately that you don’t intend to waste their time.

Warm Your Leads Up

It goes without saying that you are going to want to meet with people you don’t know or haven’t heard of you. The trick to getting that coveted “yes” is to establish yourself as someone who is not a total stranger.

LinkedIn is an effective platform that can help you do this. Use your shared connections to introduce yourself and explain how you might be connected to the person.

Back to the issue of time-sensitivity: it is infinitely more difficult to pitch to someone who doesn’t know you at all because they can’t see the value in investing their time in someone they don’t know. And, if you are pitching over email or the phone you’ve got to present your value proposition and outline the person return on time investment really quickly.

Make It Easy For The Person To Say Yes

In the greater scheme of meetings a 30-minute engagement may not seem like a lot of time but if you are the tenth person of the week to ask for it, it certainly adds up.

By acknowledging the person’s already-full schedule and asking for a minimum time investment, you’re already in their good books. Be considerate with the time and date; you’re less likely to score that meeting first thing on a Monday or at the end of the day on a Friday.

Give the person two or three options to choose from. Let the person make the choice based on what is most convenient.

In summary:

Productive meetings are the ones you want, but they are not always easy to get together. Our tips to help you score a meeting with any prospect include:

1. Be humble and state your value upfront

2. Be strategic about how you make contact. A phone call is always easier to control than email.

3. Make it impossible for the person to say no by providing a few reasonable options to choose from

4. Share your commonalities so you aren’t trying to pitch to a cold lead

And when you’ve done that, make you to read up on our tips on how to run effective meetings to ensure you are adequately prepared for your first engagement.

Get your Cosapien invite to ensure you run your meetings effectively and productively. Make all those meetings count by keeping accurate minutes and allocating follow-up tasks to you can maintain the relationship.

The post 4 Tips To Get You A Meeting With Anyone appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

The most productive meetings are well planned, well controlled and outcomes-based. This week, we share six secrets to help you manage more productive meetings that engage your employees, create accountability and ensure your department, team or workforce stays focused.

Balancing Schedules, Deadlines And Employee Needs

For employees who work an eight-hour day or 40-hour week, deadlines are a very real and highly pressurised part of the job. When you set a meeting you are effectively taking valuable time away from a limited work schedule.

Sure, from a management point of view, having everyone around the table and discussing agenda items is essential. From an employee point of view, finishing that tender, making that commission or completing the pitch for new business is more important.

Showing your employees that you are considerate of their schedules, needs and behaviours is step one. A meeting at the end of the week may very well put more pressure on people by interfering with their task deadlines. WhenIsGood.net, a service that researches optimal times to do things, says that Tuesdays at 3pm is a good time to hold meetings. It is early enough in the week not to interfere with deadlines and, being later in the afternoon, allows people to get through their morning workload. If you’d like to handle this process even more diplomatically, take a vote and find out when you can work around everyone’s schedules.

Always Have An Agenda. Don’t Deviate From It

As we all know, discussions that are not part of a meeting agenda are major time-wasters. Another major time-waster in meetings is deviating from the agenda. One of the major advantages of using Cosapien to take your meeting minutes is when you schedule a meeting, you are prompted to pre-minute agenda items. This serves two purposes:

1. Everyone arrives at the meeting knowing exactly what will be discussed and is adequately prepared to hold the discussions.
2. Everyone at the meeting knows the boundaries of what may or may not be discussed and there is no scope to add items to the agenda.

And, to address the issue of time wastage, if you really want your meetings to run like clockwork, allocate a time frame for each of the agenda items so that you do not run over the allocated time.

Foster Accountability For Meeting Outcomes

Cosapien’s minute-taking format follows that adopted by Fortune 500 companies, in that each agenda item is assigned to an employee or responsible person. Rather than adopting the “we need to do this or that” mentality, Cosapien encourages the meeting chair to delegate the tasks that arise from agenda items to specific people, and then holds them accountable to it.

To foster meeting participation, ask employees to report on the agenda items they are responsible for. Ask the person to chair the discussions about their own tasks, which will keep him or her fully present.

Apply The 2-Pizza Rule

Amazon pioneered the idea of the “2-pizza rule” to ensure that non-essential people are not invited to meetings. Obviously if non-essential or non-participative people are sitting in a meeting, it’s a major time-waster for them and for the organisation.

How does it work? According to Amazon, two pizzas should be able to feed all the people at the meeting. If they won’t, you’ve invited too many attendees. Instead of holding one weekly meeting for everyone, split the meetings up to chair smaller groups and hold more focused meetings. And yes, if you want to do something completely different, order a pizza or two.

Cosapien has a work-around for this too. If an entire department will benefit from meeting outcomes, but it is physically impossible to host everyone in the same place, you can include the everone on the meeting minutes distribution list. So, while their active participation may not be required in the meeting itself, the meeting outcomes and task generation from the meeting may impact the whole department. When you are pre-minuting on Cosapien you can include everyone’s email address on your distribution list so that they are kept updated of the outcomes.

Develop Incentives For Holding Meetings

There’s a consequence for people arriving late at a meeting: it means you’re going to start and therefore finish later than you intended. It also creates disruptions when people arrive late, because you’ve got to stop your discussions and bring the late arrival up to speed.

Create incentives for people who arrive in time to prepare for the meeting. If the meeting is scheduled for Tuesday at 3pm, the attendees should arrive at 2:55pm so they can prepare mentally and settle down. Make mention of this when you send your agenda out; maybe this is not obvious to the attendees.

One suggestion for a consequence is to ask the person who arrives late to clean up afterwards but this could arguably create some hostility and be seen as petty management skills.

A more subtle way of enforcing punctuality and preparation is to hold your meeting an hour before the end of work. If you work till 5pm, hold the meeting at 4pm. That way, if the meeting runs late, attendees will not be able to leave on time. This may happen once, but meeting attendees will probably ensure that it is the first and last time it occurs.

Create Actionable Outcomes For The Meeting

Meetings that do not foster outcomes are time wasters and ultimately, protracted conversations. Cosapien automates the task generation and management process by encouraging you to make people responsible for what is discussed. To make sure the meeting is interactive, it is a good idea to ask each person present to reflect on the tasks he or she has been delegated.

Cosapien recommends that before you publish your meeting minutes, you should show everyone present the minutes on a projector and make sure everyone is in agreement. If you want to take this a step further, ask the person who has been delegated with the task to explain what they understand is required of him or her. And yes, make allowance on your agenda for this part of the meeting; it will take some extra time to get through.

Describe or explain each task’s deliverable in as much detail as possible. A week, a month (or even a day) later, it is easy to have forgotten what was agreed in the meeting.

Find out from each responsible person  what date they can commit to, to complete the tasks. This creates a psychological imperative, by urging the person to complete the work in time.

In summary, these were the secrets we dished out to help you run more productive meetings:

1. Be considerate and hold your meetings on times and dates that are optimal for the people in your team
2. Create a meeting agenda, send it out ahead of the meeting, and stick to it. Allocate time frames for each agenda item.
3. Create accountability by making specific people responsible for specific tasks.
4. Apply the 2-pizza rule and only invite the most relevant people to the meeting. Consider holding a few small meetings instead of one big meeting where everyone is invited.
5. Develop consequences and incentives for punctual meeting attendance.
6. Get consent on actionable meeting outcomes.

… A 7^th secret: use Cosapien at every meeting to automate all of this. Remember, your mental resources are limited. Let Cosapien remember it for you. If you haven’t used Cosapien to manage productive meetings get your invite below:

The post 6 Secrets To Help You Run More Productive Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Enough of the why- what about the “how”? How do you keep things running to schedule?

Outcomes-Based Meetings Have A Clear Purpose And Agenda

Before the meeting let the attendees know what needs to be tabled. Create your agenda and prepare any supporting material in advance so your contributors have a chance to prepare. If you know that certain attendees will take up more time than you have available, also document what will not be discussed at the meeting so the parameters are defined clearly from the outset.

Manage The Meeting Size

It is really easy for a meeting to go off track or get out of hand when there are too many people present. When there are too many attendees it is less likely that people will take accountability for tasks and even pay full attention to the discussions. Of course the other extreme is not ideal either: if there aren’t enough people in attendance you might not get the full range of opinions you need. What’s the moral? Be selective. Only invite the people who are essential to the meeting.

Create The Appropriate Tone

The tone or mood of the meeting is essential for people to feel comfortable enough to contribute. As the manager of the meeting it is up to you to deal with everyone’s ideas and you set the benchmarks for tone, behaviour and conduct. Conduct yourself in the manner in which you expect everyone else to behave.

Manage Individual Distractions

There should be time and place for everyone to ask questions but there isn’t enough meeting time available for people to go off track or distract the group from the purpose of the meeting. If you are working with someone who is known for his or her tendency to go off track, speak to that person ahead of time and ask him or her to restrict his or her contributions to what is being discussed on the agenda.

Manage Diversions

Sometimes it is not just one person who takes the group off focus, but rather the result of something extraneous being brought up, which gets the support of a few people in the group. Then it becomes really easy for the meeting to be derailed. If this does happen it is a good idea to refer them to the original agenda and ask them to refocus. On occasion it may happen that someone tries repeatedly to divert the focus of the group. If this occurs it is best not to question that person directly about derailing the meeting. Rather ask the person what their underlying agenda is so the issue can be cleated and the rest of the agenda can be worked through.

Pace Your Transitions

Sometimes leaders can flick between topics too quickly. The meeting leader might be ready to move on but the rest of the group may not be. It is an effective technique to ask everyone if they are ready to move forward to a new agenda item. Allow your contributors the time and space to process each discussion. Getting their consent will also help to keep the discussion more targeted and paced appropriately for everyone present.

End The Meeting On A Positive Note

You should aim to end the meeting on a high note, because this is what sets the tone for the work that needs to follow and the tasks that need to be completed to achieve your meeting objectives. A feedback mechanism is useful because it allows consent in terms of the steps that need to be followed to achieve the objectives- as well as who should be responsible for them. When we have agreement there is no confusion about what is expected of all parties.

In summary

DO’s

Do have a clear agenda and clear meeting purpose.

Do talk to people who might take up too much of the meeting’s allocated time

Do follow up with an email, defining the next steps and who is responsible for realising them (or let Cosapien’s task management function to take care of it for you).

DON’Ts

Don’t feel the need to invite a lot of people. Keep the group to the minimum

Don’t move forward or introduce a new topic until you have group consensus and have given everyone a chance to be heard.

Don’t allow the group to be diverted by tangents. Postpone these for later discussions.

Do you need help with meetings? Join Cosapien and start holding outcomes-based meetings today.

The post 7 Tips To Give You More Control In Meetings appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.

Why Do We Even Have Meetings? Aren’t They A Waste Of Time?

Yes, meetings have value- maybe even more so now than they did 20 years ago. As organisations rely on more diverse opinions and need to adopt agile decision-making processes, meetings enable strategic decisions to be made quickly and by the relevant parties. That is, of course, if you can keep them on track.

The meeting is only the beginning of a longer process to realize organisational objectives. The minutes need to call everyone to action and actualize the parameters surrounding the tasks required. The meeting minutes need to extrapolate the decisions that were taken and assign the necessary roles so that tasks can be carried out.

Let’s take a look at some of the fundamentals of taking minutes, and how to retain control of a meeting.

Preparation And Pre-Minuting: Control the Meeting

Usually when minutes are hand-written or typed into a template, it helps if the person taking the minutes does not have a major role in the meeting. Otherwise his or her focus becomes split and the minutes may not be accurate.

When you work with Cosapien, all the essential fields are captured for you, so all you have to do is fill in the information relevant to your discussion. Because the structure is taken care of, the person hosting the meeting can still capture the minutes and retain control.

The Critical Information

Effective minutes should include:

• The meeting date and time
• The purpose of the meeting
• The name of the chair or meeting lead, as well as the attendees
• The action items and who they are assigned to
• Details of the decisions captured.

Don’t Reach For The Pen And Paper

Why not? Well if you are writing your notes down, you can’t go back and re-order or re-prioritise your points. You might need to add some detail to a discussion that is three points up. You also have to contend with rushed handwriting and illegibility.

Don’t Take Minutes Verbatim

Why not? It’s neither humanly possible nor optimal, no matter how fast your PA or secretary might shorthand or type out, to get it down word for word. Focus on the actual discussion points, not what is being said. Record the decisions being taken and who is responsible for tasks being actioned.

Don’t Wait Until After The Meeting To Finalise The Minutes

Why not? It’s vital that you take minutes during the meeting not afterwards. You run a greater risk of making mistakes and omitting important information if you try to reconstruct the discussion from memory. Review your notes straight after the meeting and get clarity on any points you may not have understood. It is also a good idea to do this when everyone can still remember the events and discussions vividly. It is recommended that the meeting lead has a chance to review the minutes before they are circulated or published. Why not share the minutes on a projector at the end of the meeting to get approval from the group?

Take control of your meetings today and test our time-saving tips. Sign up for a free, no-obligation trial and see how taking care of the minutes can add hours to your organisational productivity.

The post 5 Time-Saving Tips To Take Better Meeting Minutes appeared first on Cosapien | Measurable Integrity.