How To Conduct An Effective Group Meeting

 If the meetings held in your work environment occur often but seem inefficient, you may feel frustrated by the unproductive quality of the time you spend in them. There are a number of preparatory and group management tools that might be of value to you.

1. Prepare a meeting agenda: An agenda defines what you hope to accomplish at the meeting. It should state the meeting’s purpose; that will be in attendance; what, if any, preparation is required of each participant; a detailed list of items to be covered; the specific time and location of the meeting; and a specific finishing time.
2. Distribute the agenda in advance: Participants should have the agenda sufficiently in advance so they can adequately prepare for the meeting.
3. Consult with participants before the meeting: An unprepared participant can’t contribute to his or her full potential. It is your responsibility to ensure that members are prepared, so check with them ahead of time.
4. Get participants to go over the agenda: The first thing to do at the meeting is to have participants review the agenda, make any changes, and then approve the final agenda.
5. Establish specific parameters: Meetings should begin on time and have a specific time for completion. It is your responsibility to specify these time parameters and to hold to them.
6. Maintain focused discussion: It is your responsibility to give direction to the discussion; to keep it focused on the issues, and to minimize interruptions, disruptions, and irrelevant comments.
7. Encourage and support participation of all members: To maximize the effectiveness of problem-oriented meetings, each participant must be encouraged to contribute. Quiet or reserved personalities need to be drawn out so their ideas can be heard.
8. Maintain a balanced style: The effective group leader pushes when necessary and is passive when need be.
9. Encourage the clash of ideas: You need to encourage different points of view, critical thinking, and constructive disagreement.
10. Discourage the clash of personalities: An effective meeting is characterized by the critical assessment of ideas, not attacks on people. When running a meeting, you must quickly intercede to stop personal attacks or other forms of verbal insults.
11. Be an effective listener: You need to listen with intensity, empathy and objectivity, and do whatever is necessary to get full intended meaning from each participant’s comments.
12. Bring proper closure: You should close a meeting by summarizing the group’s accomplishments; clarifying what actions, if any, need to follow the meeting; and allocating follow-up assignments. If any decisions are made, you also need to determine who will be responsible for communicating and implementing them.

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TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM)

QUALITY: “Quality is not an act. It is a habit.”- Aristotle. Gravin (1988) comprised quality to the following six stages:

(1)   Transcendent: Quality cannot be defined, and can be recognized only when the product is used, or the service is expired.

(2)   Product-based: Quality can be judged by the presence or absence of particular characteristics of the product itself. If they are present, quality can be said to be present.

(3)   Manufacturing-based: This concept states that quality exists if the product meets original specifications. A failure to meet the standards completely represents a lack of quality.

(4)   User-based: The next stage recognized customer’s wants, expectations, needs & requirements and that they had to be met. Until the customer was completely satisfied, quality did not exist.

(5)   Value-based: The current thinking is that there is a quality/cost trade-off. The concept extends beyond that, and

(6)   Includes a philosophy and a system approach to QM.

In a word, Quality is the totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. Quality is perceived as consisting of following eight dimensions:

·        Performance: What a customer expects it to do.

·        Features: Desirable characteristics.

·        Reliability: Not malfunction or break down.

·        Conformance: Meet specified standards.

·        Durability: Have a long life.

·        Serviceability: Easy and cheap to repair.

·        Aesthetics: Look good.

·        Perceived quality: Value in the eyes of the customer.  

      TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT (TQM)

TQM is a strategic commitment by top management of an organization for changing its total approach to business and to make quality a guiding factor in everything the organization does. It is not a tool or technique but a philosophy for management that is characterized by 3 principles: Customer focus and satisfaction, Continuous improvement and Teamwork.

TQM tools and techniques

Beyond the strategic context of quality, managers can also rely on several specific tools and techniques for improving quality. Some are introduced here:

(1)   American Society for Quality Control (ASQC) is the organization that officially represents those working in the area of quality management in Canada and US.

(2)   Benchmarking is the process of continually comparing an organization’s processes with other institutions that are deemed to be best-in-class.

(3)   Continuous improvement is an ongoing commitment to improve product and/or service quality by constantly assessing and adjusting the processes and procedures used to make those products or deliver those services.

(4)   Cost of quality is an idea popularized by Philip B. Crosby in his books Quality is Free. The Art of Making Quality Certain (1979) and Quality Without Tears. The Art of Hassle-free Management (1984). Crosby’s idea is that lack of quality costs; quality saves the company money.

(5)   Outsourcing is the process of subcontracting services and operations to other firms that can do them cheaper and /or better. If a business performs each and every one of its own administrative and business services and operations, it is almost certain to be doing at least some of them in an inefficient and/or low-quality manner. If those areas can be identified and outsourced, the firm will save money and realize a higher-quality service or operation. Example- Eastman Kodak handled all its own computing operations.

(6)   Deming Prize is an award given in Japan to organizations that is somewhat equivalent to the Baldrige Awards. A large proportion of winners have produced innovations that combine statistical and engineering methods and improve cost and quality through product and process optimization redesign.

(7)   ISO-9001 refers to a set of quality standards created by the International Organization for Standardization. The technical committee of ISO outlined 20 guidelines (and the subsections that accompany these) that set the foundation for generic ISO 9001 standards.

(8)   Speed is the time needed by the organization to get something accomplished and it can be emphasized in any area, including developing, making and distributing products or services. A good illustration of the power of speed comes from General Electric.

(9)   Employee Involvement is the participation of all employees, usually in teams, as problem solvers and solution implementers, in the improvement of quality within the workplace. The term had its beginning with the Ford Motor Company. Many organizations employ an outside consultant to assist them with the facilitation and training processes.

(10) Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a set of awards established in 1987 by the US Government to honor Malcolm Baldrige following his death in a plane crash. The award was established to honor ‘companies for their achievements in quality and business performance and to raise awareness about the importance of quality and performance excellence as a competitive edge (National Institute for Standards and Technology, 2003).

(11) Statistical Quality Control is a set of specific statistical techniques that can be used to monitor quality. Acceptance sampling involves sampling finished goods to ensure that quality standards have been met. Acceptance sampling is effective only when the correct percentage of products that should be tested (for example, 2, 5 or 25 percent) is determined.

All today’s managers need to understand & appreciate the importance of Total Quality. Specially, they need to understand the meaning of Quality as well as its importance. The ingredients of Total Quality Management are important in both large and small organizations today. Various TQM tools and Techniques are welcomed by Quality Managers.

                                                                             

      Are you a quality manager? 

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How to improve decision-making?

Let’s know what’s decision-making, first. It’s the process of developing a commitment by management or authority to some course of action. Basically three things which help characterize decision-making: (1) it necessitates making a choice among two or more alternatives; (2) it is a process that typically involves more than just what was decided and (3) the ‘commitment’ which usually necessitates a commitment of resources- economic, human, and time.

Alternatively, we can say it is to view it as a process of problem solving. A problem exists when there is a perceived gap between an existing and desired state.

Step-by-steps for improving decision-making

As the managers, we must consider a lot of thing when making decisions, either individual or group. Managers’ decisions require creativity now, perhaps more than ever, as the rapid pace of change.

Here are five stages of creative thinking, which a good manager usually takes for proper decision-making-

1. Preparation: We must develop some sense of the complexities of our environment, through our daily activities and have to move along a learning curve.
2. Concentration: We should focus the specific problems which we already identified, and must contextualize as much as possible.
3. Incubation: We much approach the problems from different angles and directions as we can. We must meet the creativity in this stage and this is where brainstorming in a group really adds value.
4. Illumination: If we get a very specific idea of the problem(s), potential alternatives sometimes almost jump out at us. Otherwise, they emerge slowly, from further analysis; we really have to putt the pieces of the problem/solution mix together.
5. Verification: Yeah, it is the post problem solving stage where we have to follow up on our analysis and recommendations to ensure that they were appropriate and have indeed met planned objectives.

We as a decision-makers have to foster an environment of creativity by managing judgment heuristics, we must attempt to consider as many options as possible when making decisions, even those that are unattractive to us.

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