3 Meetings You’ll Attend This Week and How to Succeed in Them

Meetings. Whether you love them or hate them, on a weekly basis you’re likely attending some, or perhaps, a lot of them. But as we all know, more meetings do not necessarily mean more productivity. 

There are many reasons why procurement meetings don’t go as planned. Perhaps your meeting goes completely off-track because someone wasn’t aware that they needed to prepare an agenda. Or perhaps things aren’t going to plan because there are just too many unwanted distractions. 

Whatever the reason, we all know that it costs us. According to the latest research by HRM online, the average person spends 31 hours per month in pointless meetings? And while we often look elsewhere for the cause of sabotaged or pointless meetings, it’s often worth reflecting on what we could do ourselves to get more out of the meetings we attend. 

With that in mind, here are the three different types of meetings you might attend with your procurement team or others in your organisation and how to get the most out of them: 

Meeting Type 1: Getting-Stuff-Done Meeting

Wait a second, aren’t all meetings ‘getting-stuff-done’ meetings? Believe it or not, they actually aren’t, and it’s important to make a distinction. Getting-stuff-done meetings are your normal, everyday type of meetings where you meet with your colleagues to move a task forward. 

These types of meetings might be a daily standup with your procurement team or maybe a planning meeting. In today’s mostly hybrid working environment, there are a few things you need to do to ensure these meetings go smoothly. 

These go beyond the obvious advice to ‘set an agenda’, ‘start and finish on-time,’ and ‘assign actions with due dates.’  Your secret to success in this type of meeting should include: 

• Use shared documents: Are you getting together to move forward an RFP or a category analysis? To speed things along, ensure that you – if your organisation allows it – use a cloud-based tool such as Google Docs or Microsoft Teams to share the document and invite feedback/comments prior to your meeting. This way, you’ll be able to move more quickly in the meeting. 
• Give everyone their own screen: Have you been in one of those weird meetings where there’s a group of your procurement colleagues altogether and you’re one of a few people working from elsewhere? Prevent this from happening by asking everyone in the office to take a meeting from their own screen. This will ensure that anyone dialling in from elsewhere doesn’t feel excluded. 
• Set the rules of engagement:  In an online environment, it’s easier for people in your procurement team to accidentally talk over each other, since people can’t observe others’ body language. To prevent this, at the start of the meeting, let everyone know they can raise their hands if they want to say something (something that many digital meeting platforms can also help with). 

Meeting Type 2: Create-a-Connection Meeting

We all know that one of the most important things we need to work at is networking, and specifically, creating meaningful, two-way relationships. For this reason, the create-a-connection meetings are extremely important. 

These meetings include team-building activities, offsites, or group lunches, and there are some definitive things you can do to ensure they are a success. 

• Setting objectives: One mistake that a lot of us make with team-building meetings is to not set an agenda. However, simply ‘getting together’ is not particularly productive. It’s important that you set specific goals, whether that be to build trust, or to share insights, etc.
• Including activities: Alongside an objective, you need to have activities in your meeting, as well as a reflection at the end to confirm what you have all learnt and taken from the day. These activities should relate to your objectives (for example, if the objective is to get to know each other more personally, you can invite each person to talk, uninterrupted, for two minutes about something they are passionate about). 
• Mixing people: Any create-a-connection meetings can always benefit from mixing people from different levels and different functions within the organisation, as tempting as it is to simply include procurement. A mix helps give everyone different perspectives.

Meeting Type 3: Breakthrough Meetings

The final type of meeting – breakthrough meetings – is, as it suggests, a time for breakthroughs. 

Whether you’re innovating, adopting new technology, creating a strategy, or even having an empowering career conversation, these types of meetings can be complex and emotional but represent a big step forward for your ways of working in procurement. 

To make the most of these meetings, ensure that you: 

• Organise a flexible environment: The most innovative meetings almost never occur in sterile white rooms. To encourage creative thinking, use a different space for these meetings (if you’re meeting in person) to encourage dynamic interaction. If you’re meeting online, ensure that you use breakout rooms or different digital tools for brainstorming, for example, Mural.
• Create a sense of safety: Breakthrough meetings can be exciting, but they’re not always easy. Always be mindful of the type of content you’re discussing, and the fact that some employees might feel more comfortable in, say, an online environment for more sensitive career discussions.
• Take regular breaks: Breakthrough meetings are intense, and require a lot of mental energy. Ensure you take regular coffee breaks, make decisions, and don’t get stuck on one agenda item. 

Meetings are an essential part of all of our lives, but they don’t have to be a painful part. What else do you do to make the most of meetings? Let us know in the comments below.