Will Bachman 00:02
Today a tip on how a five minute time investment can improve the effectiveness of your meetings, and the overall satisfaction of your client or your boss with your work. Hey, welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. Unleashed is a production of Umbrex, the world’s first global community connecting top tier independent professionals with one another. I’m your host Will Bachman. I can’t think of a habit with a better return on investment than that of sending recap emails. And there are two flavors. Number one, the post meeting recap email. You’ve just completed a half hour or hour long meeting or phone call, maybe with one person maybe with a whole team. There were a range of issues discussed and agreements on a bunch of next steps. Great. Take five minutes and write a meeting recap email and send it to the attendees. This does not need to be a whole complete meeting minutes like you’d get it at some board meeting. It does not need to list every item that was discussed. It does not need to be full sentences. A sample template would be action items. Number one, Roxanna agreed to do XYZ by Friday. Number two, Federico will send the draft document by end of day include decisions agreed to proceed with provider ABC for the search engine optimization work include parking lot items, we postponed the discussion on the location for the holiday party. Confirming all the action items in writing helps eliminate any confusion. If Federico doesn’t think he is the one responsible, it gives them the chance to object, I thought Francisco is going to send the draft document. The expectation that you’ll be sending out a recap in writing after the meeting also helps ensure during the meeting, that you establish clarity on what has been agreed to and by whom. Now this if it’s a team meeting, ensure that someone has been designated to send the recap. Maybe it’s the manager or maybe it’s the most junior person who volunteers. If it’s a meeting between a client and a consultant, the consultant should send the email as a client receiving such a recap is a wonderful thing. The recap email says my time was not wasted. All my requests have been documented and will be taken care of. I don’t have to track down these requests because my consultant is all over it. And if you’re having trouble carving out the time to send these five minute emails, make your meetings five minutes shorter instead of half an hour scheduled 25 minutes. Use the extra five minutes to send the recap. If your meeting is supposed to be an hour schedule 55 minutes, use five minutes to send the recap email. The second flavor of recap email is the weekly update. If you are leading a project, whether as a consultant or as an employee, get in the habit of sending a weekly recap email to the project sponsor. if appropriate, you might copy the whole team or if you’re including private observations, maybe it’s just the project sponsor. Either way, the weekly recap does not need to be a five page essay. It shouldn’t be long, short and to the point. Here are a few elements you could include number one, this week, we accomplished x and y. Or this week, we learned X and Y number two. This week we plan to do z, but we hit this roadblock. So here’s what we’re going to do to address that. Number three. Next week, we’re going to do a, b and c. Number four, we could use your help to the project sponsor we could use your help on DNA. And number five, our next update meeting with you is on filling the date. The weekly recap includes valuable content but it also includes a meta message, the meta messages, we are proactively managing this project we have a plan. We are accomplishing what we set out to do. We will let you know if we have problems you can relax. Thanks for listening. If you ever need help from an independent consultant to support a project that you are working on, you can email me Will Bachman at unleashed@umbrex.com