Brad Wyant (00:00)
So Dee tell me about your experiences with meetings. What has your history with them been like? Have you been someone who runs meetings more often than you are somebody who participates them in your career? What's your experience?
Dee Davis (00:11)
Well, it shifted a lot throughout my career. Of course, early in my career, I was mostly sitting and listening in meetings. Sometimes I was the one taking the meeting minutes, which no one really ever teaches us how to do, right? That's one of the big problems that we have with meetings is that nobody teaches us how to run meetings or even how to take meeting minutes. I did have one boss though that did.
make me take live meeting minutes while the meeting's happening right into the template. And that's been one of the most valuable experiences that I've ever had. It was very, very hard because he didn't really teach me how to do it. He just told me I had to do it. So it's been a wide variety of experiences over the years. How many meetings have I been in that have been engaging, productive, necessary? Very few.
And I think that's the experience that most of us have is that we attend all these meetings that you walk out of the meeting thinking, I don't even know what that meeting was about, or that meeting could have been an email, or
I'm not sure why I was in that meeting or that was just a terrible meeting. And we walked out of there no further than when we started that meeting is the experience that most people have. My mission in life is to make my meetings at a minimum productive. I'm not necessarily there for entertainment value. there's a lot of people that have that feeling that, we need to make meetings entertaining to keep people engaged.
I'm less of an entertainer than a doer. a wide variety of experiences for me. I run a lot of meetings these days at this point in my career. How about you, Brad?
Brad Wyant (01:49)
Yeah, I never expected my life to devolve into meetings the way that my career did for a long time after graduating from my, bachelor's program. But my first experiences with meetings came when I was in undergrad and I ran the meetings for my thesis team. had an undergraduate thesis senior project type thing we did. And was a team of six mechanical engineers.
and we would all get together and work out what had to be done and see if we'd done that or not. And it was in that instance that I realized that the power of running an effective meeting can propel a project to success or can stymie it in stagnation and just prevent it from moving forward. But luckily I talked to some people outside of the engineering school who helped me.
Understand what a productive meeting could be and learn a lot then, but kept learning throughout my career about how to improve meetings, how to make them better. So that's that's my experience of meetings. It's a it's a very important tool and run amok can be something that makes everyone miserable. I was talking to somebody on a walk this morning around Wash Park here in Denver and he was saying, yeah, every time I'm in a meeting like this is not the meeting we need to be having. I want to have another meeting and then he asks.
other people disorganization. Hey, we need to have this meeting and they're like, you want to have another meeting? It's like, yeah, I want to have a different meeting. I don't want to have those meetings. Let's cut those meetings and have this meeting. I'm sure a lot of people listening feel the same way. So this podcast, we're to get into what the meeting problem is, how to solve it, how to run the best meeting that Dee and I know how to run. The first meeting I ever ran was the OAC meeting on a project and
I learned from somebody who I will name because I want to give him credit for the great work that he did to mentor me in this area. He was a project executive at time at the time that his name was Tom Malloy. he was a great calming presence on the job site. whenever he visited, he was always mellow and in control and listening before he spoke. But one of the things he observed in our
records of our meetings and in participating in our meetings was they ran long They were there almost an hour long, if not longer. And he said, all right, Brad, you're the project member on the job site who needs to be running these meetings. Your project manager's got other things he's got to take care of. You can't have this meeting be an hour long. You need to cut it down to a half hour. I said, OK, I get that. But. Why? What's taking this amount of time?
gonna get us is like, well, staff utilization, you have other things you need to be doing on the job site. You need to free up your superintendents to go be there in case of an emergency to spend more time on the schedule. Okay, staff utilization, but making people feel heard seems to be a really important part of achieving customer service goals. This client really wants us to be in these meetings and to feel like a partner to them in their conversations with their other stakeholders. He said, okay, you need to find a way to do that.
And run an efficient meeting. You need to find a way to cram all that listening, all of that customer service into a half hour. I was like, all right, let's do it. It's challenge might as well. The format that he introduced to us as opposed to the rambling. So-and-so said this, so-and-so said that this person wanted this, this person requested that. It was getting to be a three or four, eight and a half by 11 page.
minutes every time to record what had been said, because I thought that was the goal. He said, nope, you need to have date initiated the action item, the due date and responsible person and nothing else. And at first when he made that request, I was like, hold on, this is. Really constraining how will we know what was discussed? Isn't it important to record the discussion? Dee have you ever had instances where recording what was said was important?
In addition to the do outs or what are your thoughts on that as far as the balance of short meeting minutes versus long but covered what was said?
Dee Davis (05:47)
that was one of the important lessons that I learned when I learned how to take live meeting minutes I started off by recording the conversation, and I don't mean using a recording device, but typing it out and I would do kind of a little shorthand typing to.
commemorate, if you will, what everybody was talking about during the meeting. And still there's so much conversation that happens that ends up being irrelevant. The skill in taking meeting minutes is listening to the conversation and only writing down what's important.
That's the skill of taking efficient meeting minutes so that you're not writing paragraphs of information. The paragraphs of information is not what's important. The takeaway is, and I think that's what Tom was getting at, is the takeaway is the action. Who's doing what? Sometimes it is important to write down
details about what somebody said especially if you are in a position of being a general contractor in a meeting where the owner is requesting something. They're requesting a change of some kind. They're requesting a design shift. You're in a design meeting and the owner is telling you you need to do ABC. That kind of thing is important to write down, but.
just generally, well, Joe said this, this, this, this, and that, and then so-and-so responded, not important.
Brad Wyant (07:06)
Right, it with gossip column, not a useful tool for business. That was the point Tom made to me as well. you need to make this short and sweet enough that somebody who wasn't in the meeting can act as if they had been there and use the information they needed to have. That's that's the big takeaway that I was like, oh, OK, just what so and so said. And then getting there to sense it and saying, I think this is a bad idea or something on those lines. I said a little negative, I guess, but.
That's that's not what people need to know. The. Ego check he gave me was that no one is reading your meaning that it's to remember what was discussed. They only care about what they and others need to do. That's the only thing anyone wants to remember. We're not here to record history unless you're working in the White House or some other historic place where what people said will stand the test of time.
Dee Davis (07:56)
Well, and the importance of any meeting that you're running. you always have to keep in mind what is the intent of this meeting and we'll talk a little bit more later about why we have different meetings. But what is the purpose of the meeting? Is the purpose of the meeting Is it a problem solving meeting? Is it an update meeting? Is it a check in meeting? What is the purpose of the meeting that you're running or attending and?
making sure you have the right people in the meeting and all that kind of thing. But you have to keep that when you're the guy that's writing the meeting minutes, what is the purpose of the meeting? Where are we trying to go with this meeting? And making sure that your meeting stays on track based on the actual goal of the meeting.
Brad Wyant (08:37)
Well put, so let's talk a little about the format. So he's got date initiated action item due date responsible person. The reason that I now think it's important to have date initiated involved is that. When you're sitting in the meeting, if somebody who doesn't attend very often or somebody who's at a 30,000 foot level wants to know how long you've been talking about this problem, they can see how long this thing has been in somebody's court and see. OK, this is not the first time we talked about this.
Or this is a brand new thing. It just happened last week. They get a better frame of reference for. How long the the items been open? Listing an action item as opposed to a description of what was said and the discussion to this point. Makes it so that you can use one sentence to describe what needs to happen. Doing that can often be complicated. think. One of the tendencies I had to pull myself away from was trying to create an action item where.
A group of people have responsibility for one outcome and saying, X, Y, and Z companies shall do this thing. That's not a good action item. An action item has to have one responsible person. And it has to be just it has to be something you can describe in one sentence If it's more complicated than that, it's maybe multiple action items. The reason it has to be one person.
is so that there can't be finger pointing later on. I thought you were going to do it. thought you were going do it. Having it be one whole company that's responsible for it, the whole organization is not necessarily going to be organized enough to say this person needs to do this. If the company comes back to you and says, hey, this is not going to be the person that does that thing, that they're not actually going to be responsible. We're going to make this other person responsible. No harm, no foul. But
If you don't specify a single person, there's room for miscommunication. There's room for it to get misinterpreted as somebody else's responsibility. At least if there is a name associated with it, that person can say, well, I don't think I'm responsible for this. And then a conversation occurs.
Dee Davis (10:29)
Let's be honest. What happens with any meeting is that when people walk out, if their name isn't on any action items, they don't think about that meeting again until they show up to it again. And you have to ask yourself if they're walking away on a consistent basis with no action items, what is the purpose of them even attending the meeting? Which is yet another
another problem that we face too many people in meetings.
So having an individual's name makes that person number one, pay attention. And number two, you're then there to hold their feet to the fire. Everybody turns around and looks at that person and they better have an update at that next meeting because it's sitting on their shoulders now. Because it says Brad right there. So Brad knows he's responsible. Everybody else knows Brad's responsible.
And therefore, Brad is going to take ownership of that. But if we just say that Brad's company is there, even if he's the only one from his company sitting there in that meeting, he's not responsible. It doesn't have his name on it. He thinks somebody else is doing it. That's one of the biggest problems we face in meetings is individual responsibility.
Brad Wyant (11:40)
As a manager, as a leader in any circumstance, being able to leverage something as simple as a document to create individual responsibility is one of the biggest levers of a great set of meeting minutes. By making a single person responsible for it and by being consistent about emailing out the meeting minutes right after the meeting, there's no excuse. And it's not you accusing the person of not completing their action item. We were all at the last meeting.
You were there when we agree that this was going to be your action item and now you haven't done it. What do you have to share with the class? It becomes. Much less about a confrontation and much more about the person who didn't do their their action item and having to explain themselves. And that's not always a bad thing. Maybe something happened that prevented that person from doing something. You're not necessarily putting somebody. In the gallows, you're not necessarily putting them in a public stockade, but.
You're not constantly making yourself an instigator of holding everybody responsible. It's the meeting minutes are holding people responsible and it's like a third place socially. It's not one person, it's its own sort of crafty, subtle entity.
Dee Davis (12:42)
Well, and you hit on an important point there a second ago about sending the meeting minutes out immediately after the meeting. That is also something that is very important to send it same day at a minimum, if at all possible, back to the live meeting minutes. You're doing it while the meeting's actually happening. So you might have to groom it up a little bit to make it look pretty, but for the most part, you're putting it in the format, you're writing the words right then.
Why not PDF it and hit the button? If you wait, like I see so happen, especially with OAC meetings, I see this happen on more and more project sites over the years. I get the meeting minutes five minutes before the next meeting starts a week later.
Brad Wyant (13:21)
Ha
Dee Davis (13:22)
I've had no opportunity to read. We're kind of just taking that whole thing of anybody's even reading any of this
out of the equation because we're not giving you an opportunity to read it. You're not taking them during the meeting. So I don't know what you're actually writing down. When I take meeting minutes, I'm sharing my screen and everybody can see what I'm writing. If there's any disagreement, if there's any like, wait, wait, wait, that's not quite right. Everybody's looking at it right now while I'm taking the meeting minutes. And then I hit the button when I'm done and it's in your court same day.
Brad Wyant (13:52)
That's very interesting. I've never heard of anybody doing the meeting minutes live on a screen shared like that, but I think that's very powerful. I had an instance. I don't do that. I write down on a legal pad in handwritten so that I remember more efficiently that way that and it's just a muscle memory thing for me, but I also think it's easier to have all of the things that are going on a certain project in that legal pad because it becomes a.
chronological record of what's going on in the project for me. That's just my personal thing, but then I send out the meeting minutes the day after and. One of the. Problems with my method as opposed to Dee's is that when we're talking about an action item that I'm going to add to the meeting minutes. I often had to tide off and say OK, so to cover that the action item is that Dee is going to go ask the tile subcontractor. Where the tile is and that's.
going to be due on such and such day, because we need to know by this date that good with you Dee and then do have to be like, yeah, that's fine. That is the action I will take on. And then we continue on. But when I was working with a particular client, they want to say, well, there's no action item here. We just need to keep talking about this. It's like, OK, the format I'm trying to work us towards here is that there has been action. And then the client would push back. I don't want there to be an action item. I just want it recorded that this was said. I have to say, well, I can do that. But.
We need to have a do out there needs to be something that goes on beyond us. Otherwise it's not going to be useful in these meetings to get really long. It's like well, I'm the client. I want the meeting. That's my way. OK, and then you have to. Have a meeting to talk about the format of the meeting and we that happened. We did do that, which probably doesn't surprise many people. Of course that can happen in any business, but. We had to bring them around our streamlined and demonstrate that a streamlined meeting was going to be more effective for everybody.
that recording something like a conversation, somebody's thoughts, somebody's opinion in a meeting that was not going to be useful in any kind of circumstances. It wasn't going to be a record document like a court thing. It wouldn't be a contract document. It's not the place.
Dee Davis (15:49)
Yeah, there's two kinds of not great meeting minutes that I've seen out there. one kind is the novel that you're talking about. you're writing a novel and it's like no one's going to read the novel. The novel has no value. And the other kind is. I was in the meeting, I'm reading the meeting minutes days later now and. There's there's no value in these meeting minutes. There's nothing in here.
That does anything and that's the majority of the meeting minutes that I find there's no action items or they're not assigned to anybody, it's just a bunch of words and it's like, well, OK, so here's the status of the project. That could have been an email.
Right? I mean, how many meetings have you gone into or you walked out and you said that could have been an email. So we got to be really careful about the kinds of things. And I think we fall into this pit a lot, especially in OAC type meetings where what we're saying is we're saying, well, here's the status of the construction. Here's the status of safety. Here's the status of those are the kinds of things that can be hit on very, very quickly. And we.
I've been in meetings where we're still talking about safety 10, 15 minutes into the meeting when nothing actually happened. was no safety incident to discuss. There was no major update to discuss, but we're 15 minutes into an hour long meeting and we're still on item one or two of the agenda. That's not okay. The really quick hitting updates, the two minutes or less on each item.
is something that you have to train people to do. And if that's their moment, if it's your safety guy, that's his moment. he's got the spotlight for the safety portion. He may be a 10, 15 minute talker, or he may be a two minute and walk out the door talker. But if you've got a 10 or 15 minute talker, you don't need to have a safety huddle. It's not a safety huddle in an OAC meeting. So you got to be real careful about that kind of stuff. Because that makes it.
an hour long meeting and you burnt 25 % of your time and you haven't done anything yet.
Brad Wyant (17:46)
I think that's a really interesting point. The question you can ask yourself when you're in your own work stream trying to make your meetings more efficient is what's really the emotional need that's going on here? Is the person who's talking, talking to hear themselves talk, talking to elevate their brand, their name among the job site, or just trying to have their 15 minutes of fame. If that might be what's going on, find a way to bring that person around to seeing that
them having a moment doesn't mean that it needs to take that long. People are going to remember succinct and.
30 seconds rather than. The 15 minutes and it's going to more meaningful if you're trying to stretch content that should take 30 seconds over 10 minutes people can hate you people are to be driven nuts by you. The other way you can try to streamline meetings if you're having that conversation and saying hey we just need to find more time. Just add up the dollar amount per hour of the people in the room and multiply that by how many meetings you have over the job site. Or over the project duration.
and say, here's the number. We can do this math back of napkin and.
Dee Davis (18:48)
cost us $5,000 an hour, $10,000 an hour, whatever the number is, depending on your project size, it costs every time we have this meeting, costs us this many dollars.
Brad Wyant (18:58)
and it's this many dollars per minute. Do we need to spend 10 minutes on safety? It's not worth it. The math does not work out. Now, safety is important. I'm not saying safety is not important. We should talk about safety, it's not worth that.
Dee Davis (19:10)
If you well, and it depends on what's going on in your job, right? And you don't need to talk about things that aren't relevant at that point in time. If procurement is going along swimmingly and there's nothing to discuss, skip it. Right? Just because it has its little section on the agenda or in the meeting minutes doesn't mean you have to talk about it every time. If there's nothing to talk about, skip it.
If everything's going great and safety, we worked 2000 hours this last week, man hours, no incidents. That's all you need to say. If there's a safety concern, that's different and maybe you need to have a one-off meeting about it. Maybe the OAC is the right venue, maybe there's a one-off meeting about it, but you make that decision based on your individual team's needs. But does everybody in that...
room need to be sitting there for a 20 minute discussion about what's happening, whether it's safety or procurement or any other thing is a question you have to ask yourself, or is it a one off meeting to have that specific discussion?
Brad Wyant (20:05)
this is where, especially on big projects, the meeting about the meeting can be useful. I was on a project where we had 20 people and there was so much going on the job that we had a team internal project meeting before the OAC where we would both run through individual updates and bring things to the table for the project team to know more about and do our own little preview of what we were and we're not going to talk about in the OAC so that we could say,
Do we want to go into that safety incident? No, we want to say, hey, there was a safety incident. There's another meeting about it at this time. If you want to attend, here's the deal. Too long, didn't read version. We're handling it. And then, you know, the OAC can go on. That kind of organization helped us run an OAC that was a lot more efficient while also serving our internal team needs. That is a meeting to have a meeting, but it's mostly a meeting to make
that meeting more efficient and to service different needs which are internal to the project team.
So, summing it up, the four item format with a date-initiated action, item due date, and responsible person has been really useful for both of us in our careers. It helps become a third place that holds everyone in the meeting accountable by their past selves rather than by an individual. And it removes emotion from the need to stay on track. The last thing I want to say about that, I guess, in terms of
how meaningful that set of tools is, is to say that the person running the wields those minutes to advance the project objectives. So if you're a contractor leading an OAC, you get that time and that leverage by controlling what is and is not an action item and tying the discussion to an action item to say, all right, I know what has to happen project schedule wise. These are the needs of the project. This is the due date my superintendent told me about.
or I can read the project schedule, having a printed project schedule is very useful in project OACs, in my opinion. We need this done by this date. Can this person do it? Great. Move on. That's your lever that you're trying to work in an OAC, in my opinion.
Dee Davis (22:08)
Yeah, the only other column I've added over the years to the format that you're describing is a update column like the date that something was updated, because sometimes you're going to have an inception date. You're going to have a due date, and those are going to be far apart because it's something that's important. It's long term. Maybe there's multiple steps to it, or maybe there's a prolonged period of time.
So I've added a column in my meeting minutes. That's the last time something was updated. And I use Excel for my meeting minutes. I always use an Excel format because it's super easy to update and extract and copy paste if I need to make a new action item or anything like that. But I can sort it by individual. I can sort it by due date. And that's how I make my agendas.
So just because something is on the master list doesn't mean we're going to talk about it this week. Maybe it's not due for a month. I don't need to talk about it today.
So I'm going to sort that out of my agenda to keep my meetings focused and not have it cluttering up what I'm doing today in that meeting.
Brad Wyant (23:17)
Here I am on a Sunday sitting watching the rainfall here and getting excited about the idea of changing the way that that is like that's tantalizing the opportunity to do that. So neat. I love that. That's way cool. And shout out to my long suffering CMIC users. If you're listening, if you're watching, we wish we could use Excel. We wish, but no, we can't. So if you're in that boat, I suffer with you.
Dee Davis (23:39)
Well, and that's a really good point though you bring up. So on these projects, we are often asked to use different platforms to take meeting minutes, right? So whether it be Procore or CMIC or I can't even tell you, I've probably used 10 different project management platforms over the years. Some are very well set up for meeting minutes, some not so much.
ACC was the latest one that I had to wrestle through. Here's the thing. The majority, and I haven't used CMIC in a long time, so you'll have to refresh my memory. whatever platform, you're like, I can't use Excel because they're making me do it in ACC, okay, fine. But if you dig into ACC and you set it up properly, you can assign due dates.
and action items to individual humans. And the great thing about it, and Procore works the same way, is that when you assign it to that person, that individual, when they log in, it shows up on their dashboard. So they can't forget about it. It's actually really beautiful, but it only works if you do it that way, as you're putting the meeting minutes into the software, you have to take that extra step of assigning it to that person and putting in that due date.
Otherwise it just hangs out and no one ever sees it.
Brad Wyant (24:55)
And you have to do the directory thing and you got to their email on the phone and the whole thing. But if you do it, if you set it up and then you're with these people for more than a couple of months, it really helps. It really makes a difference in every time they're logged into Procore. Even if it's somebody who doesn't log into Procore that often, they'll see it when they do.
Dee Davis (25:11)
They will. And yes, you have to put in the directory and all that. But presumably, if you're using a platform like that, it's a slightly longer project. It's a bigger project. And you're utilizing the software because you're in there. And now, if something gets assigned on those platforms, the only way you can assign to an individual is if their info is in there. So I've had this happen before in ACC and Procore both.
We're assigning it to somebody who's not a regular meeting attendee. Well, if they don't have a Procore login or an ACC login, it doesn't work. You can't assign them anything. And I've had that happen before. That can be one of the problems with those platforms. And of course, in order to have a login, you have to pay for a license for that person, which costs money. So some projects have tried to minimize how many people
are holding licenses and so. I would recommend that you if that's the situation that you're in, you find a way to do your meeting minutes and your action items outside and maybe upload those results into that platform.
Brad Wyant (26:14)
That gets tough. Yep, agreed. When you're on the project that is cash constrained, which is all projects, and you don't have enough Procore licenses, that's how they make the money, though. That's what they do. let's talk about the difference between meeting minutes and meeting agendas. Some people will stick in the mud and say that, nope, meeting minutes and agendas are different.
You have to word them differently. I think if you use this format well, the meeting minutes become the meeting agenda for the next meeting. You can filter out actions like Dee said that don't apply for the next month or two and you don't need to talk about them. let's say you have your OAC on Wednesday, then you send out your meeting minutes Wednesday night. Meeting minutes record what was said, the action items that needed to be executed on, and then Tuesday night before your next OAC you send out.
that same PDF again, and it's your your meeting agenda for what you're about to talk about. It's a little less work for the PE, which we love, as the PE, as the most recent PE on the call. then it's tell them what you told them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them. It's repetition that gives people fewer excuses not to be informed.
doing things regularly as the person responsible for the meeting minutes, like clockwork at the same time every evening at the same time before each meeting helps people expect that from you and helps people be in tune to it. That's best practice that I learned very meaningful. There was this one person that never showed up to our OACs, but that needed to be on the meeting minutes for some reason from a client's organization. And I think it was, was sick.
or something happened. was working a night shift a night before and she emailed me like an hour after I usually send out the meeting. It's like what happened? Why didn't you send out the meeting? It's I was like, oh my God, somebody reads what I'm writing. What the heck? It was a great little moment. I was like, I'm working on it. I'm getting them out. Just give me a sec. She's like, OK, good. I miss your meeting minutes. It was a funny, funny connecting human moment with her. But anyway.
Dee Davis (28:03)
Yeah, that is always a little shocking when somebody responds and says, hey, I don't think you got this right. You're like, somebody's reading my meeting minutes.
Brad Wyant (28:11)
That's the best too. that's a good that brings us into our next. Best practice if you don't send out the meeting minutes right after the meeting, people are going to forget and then say, well, you sent him out like three days after I can't be held responsible for remembering what I said three days ago. That's your fault, not mine. And you know, we can debate the validity of that. I think there's maybe a shred of a leg to stand on there in terms of defensibility. But if you send it out right away, people read it.
Or at least they had the chance to read it and say no, that's not what I agreed to do and then you can send out revisions, but.
Dee Davis (28:43)
yeah, and the other thing is that people move on, right? You know, they leave the meeting and they go on to do other things. And by the end of that day or within 24 hours, they have completely checked out, forgotten, moved on. They've done 20 things since the meeting happened. What are the odds that they're going to go back when those meeting minutes come out a few days later? What are the odds that they're going to go back and actually read those?
I would say the longer timeframe between the meeting and sending out of the meeting minutes, the less likely that people are going to be to read those.
Brad Wyant (29:19)
Yep. Another good best practice here. Always take attendance. It takes a little bit of time at the beginning of the meeting. It's a good opportunity for other people to mingle and talk because that's where people we want to connect. I that's an important space to allow for. Some people are a little bit specific about starting on time, but starting includes taking attendance and understanding who was and was not there. If. You assign an action item and somebody wasn't there.
You want to make it clear that that action item was assigned by somebody else that spoke for them, or if somebody claims that they weren't there, you want to say, no, no, you were there and we did talk about it. So recording attendance protects everybody in the best way possible, I think. Do you have you ever been on a meeting minute that didn't have attendance or have you ever thought about that in different way?
Dee Davis (30:08)
Formal meeting minutes generally have attendance. However, now in this world of remote meetings where people, have people that are attending remotely, people that are attending in person. It's more important when it comes to fully in-person meetings or mixed meetings where you have in-person attendees as well as remote attendees.
can use Teams or Zoom or whatever, it'll give you an attendance report when you're done. So you can tell who logged on. And so that's helpful if you ever needed to go back to it. But if you have people that are attending in person, like a job site huddle kind of a meeting, it's always really important to record who is there. I definitely have had meetings where it said I was there when I wasn't.
or the opposite. if you didn't attend a meeting and something really important happened, it might be in your best interest to make sure that the attendance is correct.
Brad Wyant (31:00)
Yeah, absolutely. And if you're the one running your meeting minutes, being wrong about who was there can really. That's the kind of thing somebody might remember if something was said that they should have been there to hear or somebody called them out later. Be sure to do that right because you have a great opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot over a pretty simple. Workflow in that area.
Dee Davis (31:21)
And what you can't control is when someone leaves a meeting early that happens all the time. have one client in particular that has a tendency to leave early in meetings. they'll, log in at the beginning, but then at some point they've just logged off and you're not even sure exactly when that happened. So you're not sure what they heard and what they didn't hear. or people that are late. So one of my things is I start meetings on time, try to respect everybody's
calendar, everybody's got stuff to do. I'm kind of a stickler about starting meetings on time. tried to never start meetings more than one to two minutes late at the very most. And so that means you as the person initiating the meeting, you must be early. You have things to do. You have to get there. You have to, you have to show up. You have to log on. You have to do whatever it is that you're going to do. You got to have your meeting minutes pulled up. You got to start taking attendance. So you can't be late.
If you're the person that's running the meeting, that's a huge no-no. You have to show up, you have to show up on time, and then you should respect everybody's time by starting that meeting on time. And if you have people trickling in, that creates a challenge for you as the attendance taker to make sure that you're falling back at some point and grabbing those people that showed up a few minutes late.
Brad Wyant (32:32)
think that's a fun note about being on time. in my masters, there was a guy named Brian. Great guy, he was a ex-bechtel guy. And his note to us was that how you show up indicates your level of respect for the people in the organization and yourself. And if you show up on time, on time is late. And if you show up early, you're definitely gonna be on time.
If your job, as many of you will have it be, is to make things happen on time, on schedule, and you don't show up for meetings on time, people are not going to associate you as somebody who is proficient in their chosen profession. Consider your behavior accordingly. And I thought that was great advice because you see people all the time who are constantly late to things, subcontractors, clients, whoever it may be. And then
In my experience, at least the people who are always late to stuff are always behind on their work or always promising dates they can't meet. Being a person of your word starts with the simple stuff.
Dee Davis (33:24)
Yeah, I call those the show boaters, by the way. I teach a whole class on running efficient meetings. I even do a half day seminar on it. I call the ones that are chronically late, the show boaters, they love to make an entrance. And then what's the first thing they want you to do when they show up five minutes, 10 minutes late to a meeting. They want you to go back and catch them up. want to waste everybody's time who
Brad Wyant (33:42)
them up.
Dee Davis (33:47)
got there on time. They want you to repeat everything because they were late. sorry, I was I was in another meeting that ran over. Well, that's a whole different problem. But I showed up late, and I'm important, therefore, everybody stop, go back and start over again. So as somebody who's running a meeting, you can't fall into that trap. Do not cater to a showboater ever because you are teaching them that it's OK to be late and it's OK to disrespect everybody's time.
And it's hard because they're usually owners, people in important positions, they're in leadership positions, they're in high level positions that do it. And they do it because they get away with it.
Brad Wyant (34:23)
Yep. Now Dee in your professional opinion, how do you? Kindly. Politely deal with the showboater but I've I've been in this circumstance and the strategy I've used is to say, hey, so glad you're here. Thanks for coming. The meeting that's going to reflect what you missed. We're moving on. Something along those lines.
It takes the air out of the conversation, it still leaves some people that were gonna be like, no, no, no, I wanna know now.
Should you find yourself in that kind of position as a young person without very much authority in a project? What do you do? How do you resolve that kind of a conflict? How do you make a showboater come around to your way of seeing things without bringing a hammer down on somebody you can't hammer?
Dee Davis (35:01)
Yeah, you try to respectfully do it right then and there and just say, I've offered, you know what, I'll catch you up after. Give me five, 10 minutes after and I'll catch you up so that you're not wasting everybody in the room's time. You don't say that part of it, but that's the implication, right? That sometimes works. But if you have somebody that's just insistent, you may have to roll with it in the moment because
You're not going to create a big conflict in front of all these people with this person and authority in the middle of this meeting. And you may have to sacrifice that meeting. But what you do is you go back to that person after. And you sit down with them and you have a conversation. I've had to do this. I tell this story every time I teach the effective meetings class.
This person was late every single time. They were in a leadership position. They were late every single time. They were my client. OK, so it's tough. It's tough when you're in that position. They were late to meetings. They called. I mean, it was bad. And I finally had to sit them down and say, listen, here's the deal. This is unsustainable. We cannot.
This is sinking the project. it's costing us a fortune. It's hurting the project. We have to start these meetings on time. So from now on. If you're late. If give them that opportunity, right? If you're late.
I'm going to just keep going. I'm not stopping, I'm not slowing down and I'm not backtracking. And you then will need to sit with me after. Now you're asking them to make another sacrifice, right? You're gonna ask them to make a sacrifice. It's not sacrificing anything for them to make everybody else sit and listen to the meeting minutes that already happened or the meeting events that already happened. But it is sacrificing for them.
if you're asking for more of their time later to get that thing that they want, which is to be caught up. And they're not going to be likely willing to do that.
Brad Wyant (36:47)
It's a tough conversation and the kind of language you just use, I think, is like that second or third conversation with somebody who's been perennially late. But the first one's like, hey, I want to run this meeting as efficiently as possible. I want to be respectful of everyone's time. I want you to come on time. I want you to be here on time or I want you to walk in late and let me catch you up later or just read the meeting minutes because I'm trying to write these in a way that somebody who's as time constrained as you are can get through them as quickly as possible. If there's a way I could do that better, you let me know.
Those kinds of tactics can really help you in that area, making it about common goals as opposed to making it about your lateness driving me nuts, even if that's the case.
Dee Davis (37:24)
Yeah, mean, showing up to meetings on time, whether you're the you're the person that's running the meeting or you're an attendee, regardless of your position is very, very important because it is showing respect to the other people there. And you as the person who's running the meeting, starting on time. And I say it out loud. I mean, I say it in words, almost every meeting, we're going to go ahead and get started. Implication, there's still a few people who are late because I want to respect everyone's time.
I say that in words at the beginning of a meeting when I know I'm starting without certain people in the room. It's okay. I've never had a single person object to that.
Brad Wyant (38:00)
It makes it pretty hard to say on anything else because it becomes about everyone's time and that's a great way to make it a broader goal. So one of the feedback pieces I've gotten on this format of agenda style is that it becomes a matter of checking in on action items. That the whole thing could have been an email where people just say I did this item, I didn't do that item. And my response to that complaint would be that a shorter meeting
Even if it's just did you do this? Yes, no. Or if it's all yeses. That short meeting can cut through the clutter. That email creates and. Allows for more time with everyone in the room or everyone on the call to bring up new action items and discuss new issues. Get to new resolutions. The whole point of a great agenda is to cover the things you know you need to cover.
so that when people are bringing a new issue to the meeting that requires the people in that room to resolve it and then discussing it and reviewing options and concluding together that you've created more time for that in-person work. Do you have any other perspectives on that? Do you think that a meeting becoming a list of action items and then not much more is a negative thing or do you think that that creates time for other things?
Dee Davis (39:13)
I think it creates time for other things and when people know that's how it's going to go, it can be really fast. they can say you know they could just give you a quick update and if you have people that are talkers, I've said this people 30 seconds or less. One minute or less update. It.
It's okay. again, you're trying to respect everybody's time and get through what you need to get through. Who doesn't want to leave a meeting early?
I have a tendency to schedule meetings for an hour, even when I think I can resolve it in less time. Because I would rather schedule it for an hour and have the right people's attention for that block of time and not need it than need it and not have it. my meeting attendees are ecstatic if we're done in 25 minutes.
Brad Wyant (40:00)
And I will say there are some people who see that hour long meeting and go, we've got an hour to sit here. So I can take time to take the, what I really think is back in the third grade, they pontificate. And if you have discussions with people one on one who you know, may be of that tendency to say, Hey, I know there's an hour here, but I'm trying to whip through this because I want to give people back the time. That's my real goal here. Then you can level set with them.
If that doesn't work, you gotta go deeper. You gotta coach people up. The person I referenced earlier, Tom Malloy, was very patient with me as I was learning to create an efficient meeting to go from this. We're going to discover the meaning of life in this meeting together. We're going to talk it out and we're going to record everything to this efficient meeting thing. I gave him all these reasons. I pushed back with him. I argued with him. It wasn't that I was arguing against him because I thought he was wrong.
I was trying to help them understand the challenges I saw and other people who pontificate people who have a lot to say are not usually just talking to hear themselves talk or at least they don't mean to be talking to hear themselves talk. They're talking because they think they have something that people need to hear and being patient with those people, coaching them along to your way will be worth it. As we discussed, it gets to be thousands of dollars an hour and we're paying as much as we are for labor might as well.
save a penny saves a penny earned. Why don't we save the time in these meetings to let those people who are supposed to be doing their jobs go do them more effectively. We're going to have fewer near misses. We're going to have fewer safety issues. We're going to have better procurement. We're going to have better performance on projects if we can coach that person to make our meetings more efficient. it's time well spent to save time is my... Be kind to those who overshare. Be kind and gentle and patient with those who need to be coached.
Because someone was for me, it made a big difference to me.
Dee Davis (41:44)
Yeah, and I call those people the wanderers. they bring up something important or they want to contribute to a meeting agenda item and they start talking. And then the next thing you know, you've lost 15 minutes of your life, you're never getting back. Right. And at the end, maybe they offer nothing of value or they were just thinking out loud or something like that. And yes, those
sort of people can be challenging in a meeting, especially again, if they are in a position of power or authority of any kind. And they're usually the nicest people, by the way, like those are the nicest people in meetings, honestly. And so it's, it's hard to be firm with somebody who's really, really nice and everybody just likes them, but they just want to talk. And so in the workshop, we do talk about how to coach those people up.
and how to manage those people in a meeting so that you're not spending your whole meeting time on a single agenda item. just flubbed that entire thing and Brad's laughing at me. I don't blame you. Tongue tied.
Brad Wyant (42:44)
Lots of words. And for those who pontificate too often, just tell them to go start podcasts like we did.
Demuted herself, but she's laughing.
Dee Davis (42:51)
I'm
laughing. Yes, we have too much to say. We have lots of thoughts and we have to get them out and you guys have to listen to it. So.
Brad Wyant (42:58)
Brief diversion, my MBA program just wrapped up a couple weeks ago. I graduated. have the degree and the end of the year we do something called the Follies Roast where we roast the entire class of 2025. And one of the things that I got roasted for was monologuing in class. Like sometimes I would have some I have some feelings, have some things to share, some participation and.
I got called out on in the rest. was a very. Accurate call out anyone who's ever worked with me or who knows me. Yeah, I I I'm not lost by MBA program, but it's interesting. I want to talk about it and I say why be in class? Why be in person if you're not going to talk a little bit?
Dee Davis (43:37)
Yeah, I have words and I haven't used them all yet, so let's go.
Brad Wyant (43:40)
Yep, too many English majors and English teachers in my family background history to not to use them.
Dee Davis (43:46)
you asked the question, is there any minuses against using the action items as as your meeting minutes or as your to do list for the meeting? I love the idea of everybody providing an update and so that you could just get all the updates and And not have the meeting and send it out. I love that idea. The reality is people don't. I've tried it. I've I've made the big shared
spreadsheet, everybody go in before the meeting and update your action items, you know what? It's never happened once. Never. No matter who the group is, no matter how much we try to implement it, getting people to update their action items before a meeting so that the meeting can go faster and smoother and you can just check, check, check, check, check. I've never seen it happen. So if we could ever get there,
We could save a lot of time in meetings, honestly. These meetings could be a fraction of the time that they are. And then you're just, are there any questions? Are there any new items? And you move on and maybe we'd have a 15 minute meeting.
I'm not gonna say impossible, I was gonna say it's nearly impossible to get people to cooperate with that. Because the first time they're thinking about anything in that meeting is when they walk in the door to go sit to that meeting.
Brad Wyant (44:57)
And oftentimes if there's something roadblocking that person from getting that done or they think about it, it's a great way of either holding that person accountable in the way they need to be held accountable, which is in a social atmosphere where perhaps people they report to or people who sign their checks are in the room or the people that are part of the roadblocks are in the room. And it's like, Hey, the reason that I have to able to resolve this concrete design is because I need a budget for this and
I know that budget involves both the architect and the owner, so let's talk about it little bit. And then there's use to having those people in the room. Contractor comes in. Well, you know, I don't think that's going to be as cheap as it is as you think it will be. Let's talk about this and you can collaborate. That's the whole point, in my opinion, of having a meeting is to have the people with the brains in the room to all collaborate and work together to solve the problem as opposed to an email chain that, well, I don't know, but maybe No, everyone's in the room might as well. Let's let's.
put our money where our mouth is. But well put, think that if you could do that, if you could get it to, yep, got it done, yep, got it done, yep, got it done. So yeah, well, we're done. OK, see you all next week. Bye. Everyone goes and does their job. Be pretty good.
Dee Davis (46:03)
Yeah, the next best thing that you can do is to train people to come prepared. So the most efficient and effective meeting I have ever attended in my whole life was a pharmaceutical production meeting. And this is a daily meeting with a whole bunch of people. the agenda is the same every day.
Basically it's each department reports out on status and everybody knows who's going to report out. Everybody's prepared for the report out. It's scheduled for a half an hour every morning. First thing. And it lasts no more than 10 to 15 minutes. Every time it is. The most impressive meeting I've ever it is possible is my point to get that efficient and that effective.
in meetings and if they're very on top of it, boom, boom, boom, they just press and everybody knows 30 second update. That's all we need from you. No more than one minute. If it's any more than that, it's taken offline and kicked to another huddle.
It's incredible to witness if you've never witnessed it and very effective because you've got, I don't know, 30, 40, 50 people. It's a lot of people in these meetings that log in or show up in person and hear what's going on. You don't have time to make that last a minute longer than it needs to. It's an incredibly expensive meeting.
Brad Wyant (47:23)
Yep, yep. You know that reminds me of that that 30 seconds or less that you're talking about is Apollo 11 or Apollo 13, the movie where they're doing their prelaunch checklist guidance. Go mission, go health, go and boom boom boom. Just that kind of efficiency Maybe that's the thing you use to inspire people think about how good we could be people think about how fast this could go continuous improvement. Lean.
principles often get misapplied to construction. We've talked about this before, the idea that pretty much nothing on a job site happens twice. But meetings, meetings you can efficient for sure. You can lean those out and you can make them more efficient. So go nuts on lean in your meetings.
Dee Davis (48:03)
Well, yeah, and the red, yellow, green works very, very efficiently. I use it a lot with clients. Most of them love it. If it's green, you don't need to talk about it. It's sort of like skipping an agenda on an item. can status red, yellow, green, every single item on your agenda each time. If it's green, skip it. No need to even discuss it. If it's yellow or red, then it then it makes the agenda.
I do want to bring up one other item. I do want to talk about who is attending the meetings. So have you ever been in a meeting that had way too many people in it?
Brad Wyant (48:29)
Okay.
Yes.
Dee Davis (48:39)
I have been in too many meetings that have had way too many people in them. So deciding who is going to be attending meetings is another efficiency thing. And it's a really, really important efficiency thing, again, back to keeping the cost of the meeting down, the time spent in meetings down. On average, we spend eight to 15 hours a week in meetings.
Right off the top, before you even start your week, that's how many meetings are on people's calendars is 8 to 15 hours worth. And I I've had times in my career where it's way more than 15. It's 20 or 30 hours are booked on my calendar. You're just going from meeting to meeting to meeting. So you must ask yourself whether you're running the meeting or you're the attending the meeting. Do I really need to be here
If you're attending the meeting, ask yourself, why am I here? What am I adding? What is the purpose? What is the value? If you've got two or three or five or eight people from your organization attending, you should be taking a critical look at why that is. Can one person cover it or two people cover it instead of three or four or five?
Brad Wyant (49:47)
architects. They're some of my favorite people. An OAC with five architects in it sounds like hell. That sounds immeasurably terrible.
It's the worst. It's the CC me on every email, but for meetings and it's the kind of if you feel that way, you don't know how to manage people. That's my opinion. That is a little bit harsh, but if you think you need to be in every meeting, then you don't understand how to communicate effectively.
Copy whoever wants to be copied on your meeting minutes. Unless it's something confidential, unless you need NDAs, the more the merrier know things, knowledge is power.
The people that write these softwares need to.
Be better need to do the right these softwares need to find a way to make them work so that you don't get 50 emails about stuff that you don't care about that. That is like that's another episode. That's another podcast episode is why what's wrong with software with construction management software.
And so it be, we will mail a hard copy of that episode to Procore and we will post our grievances like the Lutherans on the door, hammer the thing in there.
