THE COPPERBELT UNIVERSITY DIRECTORATE OF DISTANCE EDUCATION AND OPEN LEARNING PO.

BOX KITWE
NAME: TIMOTHY NSHIMBI P.O BOX 20515 KITWE

STUDENT NO.:09175202

PROGRAME: BBA4 COURSE: HUMAN RESOURCE & LABOR RELATIONS- BBA390 LECTURER: DR KAMANGA ASSIGNMENT :THREE

DUE DATE:13th AUGUST 2013

In many companies employee surveys have shown that communication between management and staff is sadly lacking in frequency, structure and delivery. Too often you can find the Managing Director Owner or section head on questioning says we dont have regular team meetings but we talk all the time all day another response can be that we do have team meetings, but the last one was postponed because X was away. On closer questioning of the employees in these sections or companies there can be a feeling of 1. Crisis Management 2. Lack of information 3. Lack of engagement of all staff 4. the staff member Inability to feel that they are making a contribution to the team 5. Health and Safety concerns being overlooked (especially in a construction or manufacturing environment) All these issues can be overcome by a properly structured regular team meeting. Research has shown there are some golden rules to holding these meetings. The first and by far the most important is: Regularity The workforce and staff need to get into the habit of being at the meeting. Everyone likes a routine and the recommendation is that each business unit or management team hold a weekly team meeting at a regular time and never postpone or cancel it. Another really important golden rule is to have an Agenda. Agenda In order to create structure to the meeting, however short, there should be an agenda. A typical agenda would be 1. Apologies for absence 2. Review last weeks minutes and action points (for accuracy and completion tracking) 3. Look at last weeks trading, production and Sales figures 4. Actions for week ahead 5. Health and Safety Comments 6. Any other business (AOB) 7. Confirm date, place and time of next meeting 8. Minutes If you have a team meeting with no minutes or action points that are distributed afterwards then those attending the meeting can feel that it is a talk feast with no real purpose. Time Keeping No one like a long boring meeting and especially when you have hourly paid staff then you want to keep the meeting as short and as productive as possible. You can do this by having time slots for each section of the agenda for example 1. Apologies for Absence (1 minute) 2. Review last weeks minutes (3 Minutes) 3. Figures review (10 Minutes) 4. Actions for Week ahead Company Initiatives (7 Minutes) 5. Health and Safety Comments (3 Minutes) 6. Any other Business (5 Minutes)

7. Confirm date & place of next meeting (1 Minute) The above agenda is only missing the person allocated to speak but the important point is that times have been set. Often if you have a team member who is a little unsure about having a regular meeting then you can delegate them as a Time Keeper, this not only involves them but makes sure you stick to the agenda and time. The above are the golden rules and all managers and chairman will have their styles of conducting a meeting research has shown that you should be accommodative, listening and involving. If a regular weekly team meeting is used properly, you can disseminate information, inspire staff and communicate to grow and lead your business. All too often meetings get treated like a necessary evil when they should be considered a precious resource. Meetings are only one of a number of communication techniques that can be used during the work day. It is never good to hold a meeting just to communicate something that could be written in an e-mail. It is even worse to send out an e-mail and then hold a meeting just to read what is in the e-mail. But those kinds of meetings take place every day in both small and large businesses. Meetings work best to explore problems, review performance, discuss new ventures, or strategize production. When you need real dialogue, a table is the best piece of technology to figure out a solution not e-mail or memos. Brain dumps where managers are simply sharing information may be better left to written communication. Meetings might be a good follow up in those cases if employees are not getting the message.

Good meetings start with a plan. While you should feel free to venture away from the agenda if something significant happens, managers should at least know what the reason for meeting is and what they hope to accomplish. No meeting can be everything to everyone. Meetings without a specific purpose are doomed to failure from the start. Without direction, managers babble, employees ramble on about something that only matters to them, and everyone develops a bad taste for future meetings. Meetings should not go over the allotted time except in rare instances. Starting and ending on time indicates that everyone respects each others time. This also limits the production impact of the meeting. If everyone is waiting for the one man on the phone, that results in lost productivity.

Have the right people in the room. Do not hold a meeting until all the stakeholders in the process can be there. You might want to consider inviting a few outsiders from another department because they may add a fresh perspective. This should be done to get their unique perspective not to force others to share in the misery of meeting hell.

If meetings tend to run too long, hold meetings toward the end of the day, when you know people will be in a hurry to get home. This will limit aimless chatter. Recognizing top performers in front of the entire group is an easy way to build morale. You might want to give some kind of prize for the best idea or have some other method to recognize and reward participation. Contests can be good ways to get the creative juices flowing in a board meeting.

All meetings should have a clear outcome that is recapped at the end with a quick review. Assign someone to take minutes and keep track of what was said. Consider having the top managers take notes while middle level managers or competent, lower level workers facilitate the meeting. This changes the dynamic and may lead to some innovative solutions from the floor that you would not have otherwise discovered.

Within the framework of Strategic Discipline, Meeting Rhythms offer much more than just the opportunity to provide better communication, alignment of priorities, and consistent accountability reminders. An overlooked benefit to have your leadership team participation in weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual and even daily huddle meeting rhythms is the baton passing that can be observed as new leadership team members learn from the top leadership. They discover and scrutinize how business is conducted in your company. Employee and Customer data when included as a regular part of the weekly meeting reveals the importance and value the leadership team places on listening and learning what is going on in the business. Impact from these discussions and observations allow new leadership members to realize how valuable collecting and deliberating these issues can be, and how each one affects the company. In the collective intelligence phase of the weekly meetings new leadership members can offer their input, feedback, and insights. They can begin to feel a part of the leadership as a contributing member of the team, and they gain valuable insight on just how decisions are made and view firsthand the impact decision making can have on the business.

In many organizations there is a void in leadership training. Almost everyone agrees that promoting from within is the best way to continue the growth and culture of a business. Few recognize the value that meeting rhythms offer in terms of training your leadership people to observe and learn from the daily rigors of operating your business. If you want to make sure your leadership DNA is passed on and continued after you and some of the valuable leadership group you have in your company leave, develop a structured pattern of leadership meeting rhythms. Elevate those team members who show leadership capabilities to participate in these meeting patterns as they qualify. This will enable them assimilate and understand what makes the company grow and exactly how leadership makes good decisions.

According to author Patrick Lencioni the Biggest Issue Facing Business is Accountability. How do you keep your team accountable for their responsibilities? How do you make sure assigned tasks are completed by a certain deadline? What type of tool or technology do you have in place to monitor and ensure they are completing the tasks they are assigned? Group meetings is the best way to get better performance. Although every case is a little different, generally, experience leads us to support that on cohesive teams, accountability is best handled with the entire team. Leaders bringing all staff together periodically to discuss business issues has long been considered a best practice. Depending on the size of the firm, they are held monthly, every other month or sometimes quarterly. Even with workforces increasingly dispersed around the country, leaders are utilizing technological solutions (video conferencing, webinars, blogs) to bring people together. Leaders use all-staff meetings in a number of ways, especially as a means to:

teach employees about external influences impacting the business, celebrate successes and recognize hard work, explain upcoming changes and challenges, maintain a sense of workplace unity, ask for employee input and listen to their feedback, and model what respectful and effective communication looks like.

In today's complex, fast-changing business environment, there is no hard and fast rule as to the timing of company-wide meetings, the successful workplace demands that managers and employees remain open, flexible and accommodating. Having said that, most of all staff meetings where business issues are discussed and reported on are generally conducted during normal working hours. This sends a message that the information is serious business and that management really wants all employees to understand what is going on, values their input and is sensitive to not impinging on their time off work. However, we do not necessarily believe it is a problem if management wants to hold an informational meeting over employees' lunch hour once in a while. And, there may very well be extenuating circumstances that require this, for example, a time-sensitive problem occurs, an opportunity arises or complicated travel schedules.

But how employees respond to holding meetings over lunch depends upon what their present culture is like. For example, some firms culture is quite informal, creative and very collaborative. A few times a year, management sits down with their entire staff over lunchtime and mulls over and brainstorms around a business issue. These sessions are relaxed, chatty and can even be quite playful. However, this may not play well in other settings and employees may indeed become resentful when their leaders expect them to frequently give up their lunch period for company business. It is a necessary and healthy reprieve for employees to have their own private time for lunch, to be alone, chat socially with coworkers, run errands or catch up on their favorite web sites. Meeting Best Practices Each meeting presents the chance to build or strengthen relationships among participants. The review meetings are a visible indication of a commitment to quality service. Let customers and users know why these meetings happen and how they benefit the business. Invite a representative from the user or customer community to sit in on the meeting and experience it first-hand. Invite other relevant guests to the meeting, especially if they can share an important perspective on the change.

Top 10 Meeting Best Practices: 1. Only hold meetings when they are absolutely necessary. Most meetings are not needed in the first place. Only call a meeting if it is truly needed, such as for urgent matters. Often, an email or quick phone can be just as, if not more, effective and efficient. 2. Keep meetings small. The ideal size of a meeting is two people. If your meeting has more than eight people it is no longer a meeting, it is a concert. Sometimes concerts are important, like company meetings for team building and building team spirit, but recognize that people will perceive them differently. Concerts, just like rock concerts, need to be really fun, engaging, exciting, and interesting to everyone in attendance. 3. Aim for ad-hoc meetings. Ad-hoc meetings with two to six decision makers are almost always better than standing meetings. Bringing people together to solve a problem is the best type of meeting. Review all standing meetings and kill meetings that are no longer useful or productive. 4. Make meetings optional. All meetings especially standing meetings should be optional. If people are not getting a lot out of a meeting, they should not attend, and they should self-select out of meetings. 5. Only invite people that need to be at the meeting. Be lethal and cut people. Some meetings have people creep. They start at four people and all of a sudden have forty people. Non-essential people should not attend 6. Send out a meeting agenda beforehand and notes after. Every meeting should have an

agenda that people get beforehand, ideally a day before, so that all the participants can prepare adequately for the meeting or decide to opt-out of the meeting.

7. Keep meetings as short as possible. Meetings should ideally end before the time limit allotted to them. Once discussion ceases to be productive for everyone in attendance end the meeting. 8. Never discuss a topic that doesnt engage everyone at a meeting. Meetings need to engage everyone. Every single person should be actively engaged in every topic in the meeting. If they are not engaged, they should either not be at that meeting or that topic should be discussed at a later time. If you are ever at a meeting where a side-discussion is happening between two or more participants, then it is definitely a poorly run meeting. Meetings need to engage everyone. 9. Keep meeting participants on topic and interesting. If you are at a meeting and you start day-dreaming and you miss part of the discussion that is a sign of a poorly run meeting. Meetings need to be active and if a participant is going off course or is long winded, it is the meeting organizers job to cut them off. This is not personal Meetings are about reaching a good decision, not just hearing everyones thoughts. Meeting participants should not talk more than two minutes at one time unless what they are saying is utterly mind expanding. 10. Make meetings fun. People should enjoy themselves at meetings and actually look forward to attending them. Standing meetings should have fun rituals.

REFERENCES 1. Company Law by Goulding Simon 2nd Edition (London,1999)

2. Comapany law by Douglas Smirth, (Oxford 2001)

3. Lae Express-Revision Guide by Chris Taylor (Manchester Aug 2012) 4. Company Meetings, Law Practice and Procedures by KR Chandratre (India 2009)

5. Best Practices for productive business by Chaille Brindley 2013 6. Creating a Climate for Good Communicvation by Astrachan & McMillan 2008

7. Why Organisation Healthy Trumps everythingelse in Business Patric Lecioni 2013 8. Strategic Growth Planning tomconsulting (2013)

9. Ten best practices for meetings by Lidsay Smirth (October 2008)