How to Run Meetings People Want to Attend

If you work in higher education then you have meetings. Lots of meetings. Long meetings, unproductive meetings, meetings about meetings. Don’t be part of the meeting problem, be part of the solution!

You may not be able to control how someone else runs a meeting, but if you’re the host, you can follow a few tips to ensure that when your meeting is over, the participants aren’t running for the hills or sound asleep.

The point of a meeting is to have a conversation about an issue or topic and come to a decision. Sometimes there are multiple topics and multiple decisions to be made. As the meeting organizer, you are the facilitator of the conversation and the guide leading the participants toward the decision.

Give Them Something to Talk About

Ahead of the meeting, send out the agenda and include whatever it is that is up for discussion. Whether that’s a policy draft, a project timeline, a list of goals, a link to related information, etc. It’s easier for the conversation to get going when there is something participants can react to. This allows the meeting to get right to the point, rather than waste time waiting for everyone to read a draft or review information. It also lets everyone know ahead of time how many topics are on the agenda.

Be Observant

Pay attention to who is talking and who isn’t talking. If the meeting is in person, watch how participants react to what is being said. If someone seems to squirm in their chair or cringe, ask them what they think. They may have a useful counter opinion.

If the meeting is online, watch for people to mark their hand raised and be sure to call on them. You may have to cut someone off who jumps in without raising their hand, but you can do so politely. Keep the chat window open in case anything gets added there that needs to be brought to everyone’s attention. If you don’t think you can do all those things at once, elect someone to watch the chat for you.

Watch the Clock

In addition to paying attention to the participants, pay attention to the time. Keep your agenda in front of you so you can see what is left to discuss. If the conversation is going on longer than you expected, but is productive, you may have to save one of the agenda items for another meeting. Conversely, be willing to end the meeting early if the discussion didn’t take the full time. If the conversation is straying off topic, it’s your job to let everyone know when it’s time to move to the next item.

Consider what can be accomplished offline. When time runs short, be flexible about what has to get done in the meeting and what can be done via email or shared documents outside of the meeting.

Listen

Just because you called the meeting, doesn’t mean you have to talk the whole time. As I said before, I see a meeting as a conversation. If all you want to do is present information, that doesn’t necessarily require a meeting. Gathering people together implies you want to hear what they have to say. As organizer, you pose the questions and then sit back and listen.

Know When to Step In

Sometimes one participant dominates the conversation or has an unending supply of questions. While you don’t want to skip over that person or ignore them, you may have to rein them in. A few ways of doing that are to say something like, “I hear you saying (briefly summarize their point), does anyone else want to comment?” You can cut in with, “Joe/Susie/whoever has had their hand raised for a while now, let’s hear what they have to say.” If the end of the monologue is nowhere in sight, you can interrupt the participant and let them know you’d be happy to talk with them offline, but that you need to keep the meeting going.

If time is running short and people’s hands are still raised, you need to decide whether to end the discussion and call for a decision or table the decision for next time. Either of those options is better than letting the meeting run long.

Take What You Can Get

Sometimes a final decision can’t be reached in the meeting. Instead, look for action items that will move the issue forward. If more research is needed, ask for a volunteer or assign the task to someone. If the document needs to reflect suggested edits from the meeting, have the scribe (which might be you) make the edits and send the document back out before the next meeting. If there isn’t a next meeting on the calendar, try to set one up while everyone is there. Often, that is easier than trying to get everyone to give you their availability via email or polling.

Follow-Up

When the meeting results in action items, it’s helpful to send an email to the participants afterwards with a list of who is doing what and when it is due. If several people missed the meeting and there was important information they will need before the next meeting, provide a summary or minutes that everyone can access. This allows you to post the information once for everyone to read, rather than wasting time at the beginning of the next meeting bringing everyone up to speed.

What things do you do to ensure your meetings are purposeful and productive?

When to Get Rid of a Policy

Is there such a thing as too many policies? How many is enough? The answers to these questions vary by institution and depend on the type of college, how many students attend, whether research is conducted, how many campuses make up the university, and what fields of study are offered. A commonality among all institutions, regardless of demographics, is the purpose policies serve. Some policies fulfill a legal, accrediting, or agency requirement, which means they need to remain in your library for as long as the requirement is in place. Other policies provide consistency in the way a particular issue is managed or addressed across the institution. Policies that fit this description help the college/university community know what to expect, regardless of their role. Lastly, policies may be used to manage enterprise-wide risks or operational efficiencies. When you need to get everyone on the same page, a policy can serve as the source document for stipulating conditions, limitations, and authority for making decisions.

Policies are meant to be read and used. A library that has so many policies that the common user doesn’t know where to start is not very useful. When a policy is read only by the office that wrote it, the message isn’t conveyed to the people who need it.

Most policy programs include a review cycle every three to five years to ensure that policies stay current. Consider including the option to eliminate a policy as part of that review. A few reasons that may warrant the withdrawal of a policy include:

1. A history of making exceptions to the policy;
2. Provisions that are tied to the availability of funds, meaning that individual offices and departments choose whether or not to utilize the policy;
3. Stipulations that are optional;
4. Requirements that are not value-added, and may go so far as to present an administrative burden; or
5. Conditions that are contrary to your institution’s culture and/or mission.

When you come across a policy that meets one or more of the above, it may mean that the policy needs to be reworked. For example, eligibility requirements may need to be changed or some of the limitations may need to be lifted. But it might also mean that you don’t need the policy at all. Don’t be afraid to toss it out.

How Knowing What Others are Doing Can Help You

Why does this policy have these requirements? Why does that policy exclude those? Why do we even have a policy on this? These are questions that often garner the response, “That’s just how we’ve always done it.” If that is the best answer you can find, it’s time to benchmark. This post offers a few suggestions for organizing your search.

What to Look For

First, decide what aspects of a given policy you want to review. Just reading through policies from other colleges and universities without an idea of what to look for will be a waste of your time. Consider what it is you want to change about an existing policy or what questions about a new policy you want to answer. This may include things like:

• Policy owners. Some policies have an obvious owner, like HR, IT, or Dean of Students Office. Others might be a little gray if they have wide application and straddle more than one area, like records retention or volunteers on campus. This is a data point that you can easily look for.
• Administrative structure. This includes things like whether to have a committee review something or just one person, the level at which a decision can be made, and what needs to be approved in advance.
• Scope. Which employees are covered by the policy? Does it also apply to students? Is there a dollar limit or threshold? Should the topic be broken down into more than one policy or should two policies be combined? These are just a few examples of the kinds of things that you might be questioning about your policy scope.
• Forms. Maybe you have a great policy already but need to create or update a form. Benchmarking can be used for that too by identifying which fields to include, whether to require a signature, etc.

Where to Look

Which institutions you include in your benchmarking will depend somewhat on who will be reviewing the results and how drastic the proposed changes may be.

• Your conference peers. If your college has athletics, you can’t go wrong benchmarking the institutions within your conference. This often holds a lot of water when you need to share the results with executives and/or faculty. Most schools have their policies posted online, especially public institutions. Bookmark the policy libraries of your peers so you can quickly browse to them when you need to. If your conference includes schools that publish their policies behind a login, you may need to email each institution individually to ask if they will share their policy with you.
• ACUPA colleagues. Post your questions to the ACUPA forums. Many of our members are willing to share their documents, and posting to the forums prevents you from having to send individual emails. The results can supplement the findings from your conference peers or be used alone.

How to Document

I find spreadsheets to be the best way to organize my information. Use one axis to list all the institutions and the other for your findings. Try to word the headings in a way that allows for easy comparison within a column or row. For example, using a question that can be answered yes or no makes it easy to see whether there is a strong tendency one way or another. Not all information can be answered with a yes or no, so in those cases, consider converting terminology, office names, or titles into ones that your institution uses. This allows you to compare apples to apples rather than a hodgepodge of terms. I also like to include a link to each policy as one of the columns or rows for easy reference.

Whether it’s time to revise a long-standing policy or draft a new one, benchmarking what other institutions are doing can save you time in the long run.

Seemingly Similar Words Can Be Very Different

Policies would not exist without someone to write them. That may or may not be your responsibility. Once they’re written, they need to be reviewed—for content, accuracy, use of template, comprehension, and grammar. If you are involved in policy administration, some aspect of review is bound to be your responsibility. My job affords me the opportunity to both write and review policies to one degree or another, so I see examples of good writing and not so good writing all the time. A common mistake I see when reviewing policy drafts is using one word to mean another. Let me explain what I mean…

Ensure/Insure

These two words used to be synonyms. However, sometime in the 1800s, as insurance policies became more common, the definitions diverged.

• Insure means to have some kind of financial backing for the potential loss of an asset, your health or life, etc. It should only be used when referring to insurance.
• Ensure means to make a promise or guarantee that something will happen.
• Examples:
  1. The real estate agent recommended we insure our barn.
  2. The vice president for human resources will ensure that background checks are conducted on all new hires.

Since/Because

Most people say the word “since” when they mean because. For this reason, acceptance of the two words as synonyms in dialogue is growing. However, when writing formal documents like policies, the difference between the words should be recognized.

• Since refers to a period of time between two events or from the last occurrence of an event.
• Because refers to the reason for something happening.
• Examples:
  1. Since the last time employees had training, the regulations changed.
  2. Because the regulations changed, employees will be required to go through training.

That/Which

The difference between these two words often comes down to a comma. Both are used to provide further explanation of something, but one is used when the explanation is essential to the understanding of what is being described, and the other provides nonessential information.

• Use that when the information is essential, and do not use a comma.
• Use which when the information is nonessential, and put a comma before it.
• Examples:
  1. Information Technology is responsible for maintaining the system that employees use to submit travel requests.
     In this sentence, without the information after the word “that,” IT would not know which system it has to maintain.
  2. Employees must use the travel system, which is maintained by Information Technology, to submit travel requests.
     In this sentence, who maintains the system is irrelevant to the employee’s understanding of how to submit requests.

He/She/They

This is another example of language changing with culture. Once upon a time, we used “one” as the pronoun for anyone. “He” also was acceptable as a less formal option to refer to persons of any sex. As times changed, and women demanded more equality, we began to use “he or she” or “he/she.” As Bob Dylan sang, “the times they are a-changin’” once again, and a more inclusive pronoun is “they.” However, many grammar wonks are not comfortable using a plural pronoun when the noun it describes is singular. Here are some options that may help make everyone happy.

• Use the word “individuals”
  1. Instead of: An employee must include their date of hire on the form.
  2. Write: Individuals must include their date of hire on the form.
• Omit unnecessary pronouns
  1. Instead of: The vice president, or their delegate, will review the application.
  2. Write: The vice president, or designee, will review the application.
• Restructure the sentence
  1. Instead of: When the employee returns from leave, they will need to provide documentation to their supervisor.
  2. Write: Employees need to provide documentation to their supervisors upon returning from leave.

Word usage and the ever-changing rules that apply to the English language fascinate me. Language is a living, breathing organism that grows and morphs as culture demands. This can make it difficult to keep up with the rules. Are there any examples you have come across in your work?

Can a policy management system track as well as I can?

The views expressed in this post are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of ACUPA or Purdue University.

I track a fair amount of data with each of the policies in the Purdue University policy library. Currently, I use Excel to manually track all my data. Even to me, this seems a bit archaic with the variety of policy management systems out there. I have looked at a couple vendors, but have stopped short of pursuing a contract because I am afraid I won’t be able to capture all my data.

Some data are pretty standard, such as the date of issue, the responsible executive, the responsible office, and the volume and chapter (see my post from October 2020 on Organizing a Policy Catalog to learn more about the last two). It’s easy to designate a field that captures these data. It is also easy to track the date a policy was last revised. Even systems that are not designed exclusively for policy management can track version dates.

Where I run into trouble is finding a way to automatically track the last date a policy was reviewed. Policies get revised all the time. Titles, phone numbers, and email addresses change frequently, which require an update to the affected policy, and thus, a new version date. Most of the time, however, these small administrative updates do not coincide with a comprehensive review of the policy. If I were to use the version date to determine when a policy is due for review, I would likely have a lot of policies that never get reviewed because the version date never falls outside the review period (which, at Purdue, is every five years).

I also get tripped up when a policy supersedes another policy. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as the title of the policy changing, two policies being combined into one or vice versa, old memos being updated into policies, etc. With my Excel spreadsheet, I am able to track a current policy all the way back to its origin, even if that is a memo from 1952. I can tell you the name and number of the policy or memo that addressed a given subject on a given date, and I can find a copy of that document in our e-archives. I have not had to track anything back to 1952, but I have had instances when our legal counsel needed all the versions of a policy going back several years. I just don’t see how a system could track this kind of serpentine information.

Last, but not least, we allow for interim policies. This means a policy can go into effect without having gone through all the required steps. The policy owner then has six months to finish all the steps and finalize the policy, or request an extension of the interim status. I mark policies as interim and track the six-month deadline in Excel. It seems to me that I would have to continue to track this sort of thing manually even if I had a policy management system.

Maybe I am making things too complicated. Maybe I need to let something go. What do you think?