welcome to another video on hacking clinical behavior I'm Pierre Louis BCBA a
and executive leader here at Brett DiNovi and associates so if you're watching
this video have you ever been in an unproductive meeting take five seconds
right now and just think back to the last meeting you were in that was
completely unproductive what was so bad about it why was it unproductive why was
it ineffective so this week I'm gonna be talking to you about meetings that's
right Linda LeBlanc and Melissa Nosek in 2019
have a discussion and review paper and behavior analysis and practice where
they discuss planning and leading effective meetings so you might be
wondering to yourself why are we talking about this well there's a few reasons
number one if you are a graduate student you might be thinking that a lot of what
you're going to be doing is clinical work and although that's accurate a good
amount of your work is gonna be meetings so another reason talking about meetings
is important is when I speak to clinicians the number one thing I hear
from just about everybody is they need more time more time to program for their
learners more time to analyze data more time to stay current on research and yes
even more time for self care so meetings are important and if we can make them
more effective it leaves more time for all of those things I just previously
mentioned so according to the article helping professions can spend up to 50%
of their weeks in meetings and although we don't have specific data for BC bas
we can assume that that can be the case for many of us in this field as well
this topic of meetings has been looked at in OPM there have been several TED
talks about it and you may even know about a book called death by meeting so
then who better and behavior analysts to tackle this issue of ineffective
meetings right now I'm gonna give you five steps based on this article to make
your next meeting more effective so step number one is set the agenda
what do you mean by that well let's get the names of the participants who will
be in the meeting let's write down what the goal of the meeting is gonna be how
are we discussing new goals are we discussing something that's going to be
affecting the organization or the client that should be crystal clear to all
those who are going to be in the meeting timeframe let everybody know how long
the meetings gonna be should they expect it to be a 20 minute meeting
or an hour meeting this may help them shift all the responsibilities they have
for the week and also cover what's going to be discussed in the meeting people
want to know exactly what's going to be covered so that they can be better
prepared point number 2 participants who needs to be in the meeting one of the
things that we do sometimes by mistake is we invite too many people to meetings
and often people who don't need to be there are there and they may actually
make the meeting less productive having people who do not need to be in the
meeting can lead to off-task behavior questions that don't need to be brought
up in that specific meeting sidebars or just stories that may make the meeting
less productive 3 arrange the environment does it need to be a meeting
where everybody comes to a physical location does it need to be live or
face-to-face if not it can be a phone conference or even a video conference
point number 4 lead the meeting is there a meeting leader is there somebody who's
going to take charge with the meeting and make sure it's going well and
everything's being covered the way it's supposed to one of the things that the
article recommends is having an opening statement and it may sound something
like this okay everybody today we're meeting to
discuss future planning for next year's budget or the purpose of this meeting is
to discuss training opportunities for our new registered behavior technicians
if you see in some of my previous videos you know that one of the reasons I like
behavior analysis and practice is that they offer practical suggestions and
this article is no different there's a great table in the article that provides
us with common problems that are faced in meetings as well as strategies and
suggested phrases that you can use so you can actually look at this table and
it will tell you exactly what to say so maybe somebody starts to have a sidebar
and the article will tell us exactly what we can do to bring the
meeting back to focus and point number five is closing the meeting who's going
to do what I've been in so many meetings where I step away and I'm not really
sure what my responsibilities where somebody else's responsibility is make
sure as you close the meeting we know who's going to do what next and what
follow-up actions need to happen it's also best if we have a follow-up meeting
planned and scheduled at the end of that current meeting another point that you
should probably know about meetings that's mentioned early in the article is
to think about whether you need the meeting at all if you can eliminate a
meeting from your schedule you should probably do that can it be an email a
text message can it wait for next week let's not become two meeting happy and
let's spend this time on all those things we talked about before like
working with our learners time for ourselves catching up on articles and of
course always more time for programming and graphing so here at Beretta Novi and
Associates we want to help you become the very best clinicians and leaders you
can with that in mind if you want to help us spread the science click up find
out more about PDA and if you're interested in some new content please
feel free to message us at the bottom of this video and let us know what you want
to hear next have a great week
you you