Phase: Follow Up

• Congratulations, you have made it. You completed your meeting. Now, the game's not over with yet. That's the thing. You remember that you've got preparation, facilitation, participation, and now we're in follow-up.

• All about closing this out. When at the end of a meeting, you need to determine how effective that meeting was. What I like to do to determine it whether or not a meeting is effective is save a few minutes at the very end of the meeting to maybe ask the audience.

• Maybe there's good psychological safety in your group and because of that you can actually ask people, "Hey, how was this meeting? Did you like it? Was it effective? Was it valuable?"

• Other techniques you can use that I've used in the past. If you're in a room on the whiteboard or if you're digital, maybe you're using a Trello board, create a scale one to five. One, this was not a very effective use of my time, I wish I was doing something else. And five being, this was the best use of my time possible, I'm so glad I was here.

• As people leave physically in the room have a mark on that whiteboard where they're at. If they are digital have them go ahead and vote on one of those cards one to five. And again that just gives you information in terms of hey did people feel that this was an effective meeting or not?

what's the best way to follow up with your participants?

• So once your meeting is over, let's say it was an effective meeting. Let's say you did all the right stuff. Everyone's like "Yeah, that was great."

• The first thing you've got to do after that meeting is done go out there and make sure you send out those meeting notes. Share it with the participants as well as those people who maybe you just need to inform what was covered in that meeting.

• Tell them what decisions were made, what actions we're taking. And most importantly, for those folks who took actions, make sure that they're aware of those especially.

• If you know, they need to have some sort of tracking of those, great tools like Confluence allow you to actually mention somebody in it and actually sends them a notification that says "Hey, you got this action."

• And most importantly, after let's say a few days of that meeting, follow up. Make sure things like actions are taken care of. One of the things I like to do is if I have a regular occurring meeting, what I'll do is at the beginning of every agenda will actually have a line item to look back at prior action items.

• Have we taken care of those which ones are due which ones aren't? It leads to a lot of accountability on the people who actually took those actions and it really helps move that meeting forward.

• Now if you're finding you're having an ineffective meeting so okay. Don't beat yourself up for it. It happens to all of us and the goal here is just to get better.

So a couple things you can do here is one go actually ask some folks. You know have some one-on-one sessions saying, "Hey, I'd love to get better at running effective meetings. What feedback do you have for me?"

Figure out what could make meetings better than the next time and experiment with that. Another thing you can do is, let's say it's a meeting that's on a regular basis.

Do what we call a ritual reset here at Atlassian. If you go to our Team Playbook, you'll find the ritual reset play. It's a fantastic play that allows you to kind of take a meta view of your meetings.

And saying hey if I were to reexamine all these meetings, what would I keep because I think they're super valuable? What would I maybe change because I still need that but something needs to change? And ultimately what should I get rid of? Maybe that could be more of an email. What could be async here?

Actually a great story for you here is I have a customer I've been working with in telecom that actually found themselves in need of kind of fixing up some of their meetings.

What ended up happening is they said you know, what? We'd love to try this ritual reset play out. And so they actually went and spent about an hour, which is all the time it takes running through that play.

And the next day I actually got an email from that team that says, "Hey, I just want to say running this play kind of changed our perspective on how we meet. It allowed us to really take a look and say is this meeting worthwhile or should we change it up? Should we remove it?"

And from there, they were able to kind of really change how they work together all of a sudden now, they've introduced some new ways of working. They've opened up their minds saying we can collaborate differently.

So explore things like our ritual reset because it's incredibly powerful to actually look and say, "Hey, is this the best use of our time?" And maybe it is, let's get a little bit better at it.