Company culture also affects how meetings are run. Let’s have a look how a very successful company holds their meetings: Apple.
According to Mentorphile, Apple sets a high value on so called DRIs in meetings.
“Any effective meeting at Apple will have an action list,” says a former employee. “Next to each action item will be the DRI.”
DRI stands for directly responsible individual. That is, for each action, respectively task, which was assigned in a meeting, there is exactly one person in charge. Assigning an action to multiple persons may lead to confusion and a loss of accountability.
We at AgreeDo fully agree with this: It’s important to have an agenda for a meeting. If you use AgreeDo, you will notice that when creating a task, you can assign it to exactly one person. There’s no such feature which allows multiple assignees for a task.
Of course, there are situations where a task needs to be completed by multiple persons. “Update your time sheet by end of next week” may be a task for Alice, Bob and Charles. How do you put this in your agenda using AgreeDo? There are two options:
- Create a task for every individual who has to complete the task. However, this may be impracticable if the task applies to a lot of people.
- Assign the task to someone who is responsible for everyone else. In this example: Create a task for Alice which states “Make sure everyone has updated their time sheet by end of next week”. Now Alice is responsible to check for the task’s completion. It’s her task to take care of that.