Template: The 4 Ps of Running an Effective Meeting

Virtual meetings are more challenging than in person meetings. But, they are still meetings. If you follow this advice but your meeting design and facilitation fundamentals are bad, your meeting will be bad. Before worrying about running remote meetings make sure you are running good meetings. If that is true, then adapt your good meetings to be remote friendly.

Briefly, running a good meeting means:

• Know the Purpose, Product, People and Process (agenda) before the meeting and opening the meeting by sharing this information with meeting participants.

• Have an agenda that makes clear what the core questions you seek to answer in each section of the agenda are. For any decision that will be made in the meeting, articulate the meeting participants’ role relative to that decision (e.g. decision maker, advisor or observer).

• Make sure you have time at the end of the meeting to clarify and capture next actions and decisions that were made during the meeting.

• Have a designated facilitator and note taker. The facilitator is responsible for preparing the agenda in advance and for running the meeting. The note taker is responsible for capturing decisions and next actions.

• The majority of what makes a meeting a success is the preparation that happens before your show up in the room. (convener conversation, intake [if a big meeting], agenda design, ground rule creation, managing logistics).

• Keep your meetings on topic and on time.

When designing your meeting, keep in mind the following questions to identify the 4 Ps:

1) Person/People 👩🏽‍💻

Who is running the meeting and who needs to be involved?

2) Purpose 🔎

What are the clearly defined reasons for working on the issue?

3) Product ☑️

What do we expect to achieve (objective)?

4) Process 📊

What team processes will we use?