You know the drill….the meeting that drags on forever because of unnecessary committee reports. There is good news straight from the parliamentary procedure powers that be: You do not have to include “Time-Wasting Committee Reports” on your meeting agenda.
What fits in the category of “Time-Wasting Committee Reports” exactly?
Time-Wasting Committee Report = A committee report that is given dedicated space on the agenda to tell about its activities, even though it doesn’t have any items to present for action.
You don’t need Robert’s Rules to tell you that these reports are eating up precious minutes during meetings. But parliamentary procedure can give guidance on how to tactfully, responsibly pare down the unnecessary verbal reports.
Help! How can you eliminate them?
The first step to removing time-wasting committee reports from the agenda is to ask each committee to submit an official written report and a completed committee activities form at least one day prior to when staff prints the agenda and meeting materials.
The committee activities form is a one-page summary of who’s been doing what (recently). The form isn’t rocket science to fill out and simply asks the committee to state the following information:
- Committee name
- List of committee members
- Summary of committee activities since the last meeting of the entire group
- List of action items for the entire group
Simply put, the Committee Activities Form is an at-a-glance method of determining which committees need a place on the agenda. And (wink, wink) it simultaneously functions as a method of seeing which committees are actually functioning.
Once you have a Committee Activities Form in hand for each committee, the second step to removing time-wasting committee reports from the agenda is to review the forms and give dedicated space on the agenda only to committees that have actions items to present to the entire group.
The rest of the reports should be printed for distribution at the meeting (or loaded to an internal website) so that members can read them on their own time. Similarly, at the meeting, the committees that are placed on the agenda can simply rise and present the action items they’ve listed, leaving the rest of the report to be read later at members’ leisure.
One Final Point of Clarification
Reports of committee activity, even without any action items to present for a group decision, are still important. My goal is certainly not to diminish the good, hard work that committees perform for any well-functioning organization. Sometimes active committees need a spot on the agenda, even without any action items, especially when they have vital information to communicate. But the status quo in many organization is to allow all committees time to report, with little thought for the effect reports have on the length of the meeting and the valuable time of dedicated members.
Before your next meeting, give some thought to your agenda and consider whether you can do just fine without a verbal presentation from every committee.