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Ready to introduce a reuse programme, or improve on the existing system?
Read ahead and find out the best practice for using a meeting plan to get more buy ins and increase support from your stakeholders.
In this blog post we will talk about why a meeting plan is important for getting buy in for your project, and at the end we give you a free download that you can use to plan any meeting.. and we also give you an email template you can send to your stakeholders (if you are implementing a reuse program).
Like many of our other articles, we talk about making changes to how organisations reuse surplus assets, although these practices could apply to most culture change projects.
The purpose of a meeting plan
When you go into the meeting to discuss your project, you must utilise your colleagues’ time in the most effective manner possible; no second should be wasted. The FREE meeting plan download at the end of this post will help you address all of the issues on the estate that you could potentially solve. It will also help you to identify the main benefits for the key stakeholders, whose buy in you really desire. You want your programme to be as successful as possible, so your goal is execute this meeting plan perfectly, and the onus really is on you.
Follow this template for an effective meeting that will help towards the reuse project you wish to implement or improve in your organisation.
Organisation tip #1
Q: Who needs to be in the inception meeting?
A: The main players only.
You need to figure out who to invite to this meeting because reuse across a whole organisation involves all of the staff from every department. This is because everybody needs to procure new items at some stage, it’s almost unavoidable.
Q: Who are the main players?
A: The main players are sustainability, procurement, waste, reuse, facilities and communications.
The procurement department especially is responsible for facilitating these purchases. The facilities or estates management department are vital too, as they are usually responsible for logistics. They are also the oil that greases the cogs across the whole estate, because moving physical assets is a necessary part of reuse. The communications team will talk about it, so some key players from that team should be there too. The space management team should be there too, as it’s likely they’ll be big users of a reuse system.
Organisation tip #2
Strike a balance between who is and isn’t in this meeting; if you invite too many, there could be too much input from others or there may be objectors in the ranks (remember, people don’t like change).
If there are too many people there, everyone will want to have their say and your meeting plan will get continually disrupted. You have to find the right amount of key stakeholders, and have ONLY them at the meeting - any extras will be a hindrance. As few as five people could hold the key to getting the green light on your programme, so make sure just the key stakeholders are there, plus the people you hope to work with, or your supporters.
Once you’ve had the first meeting, you can always have more, but the primary goal is to get a ‘yes’ and have that ball rolling. Once the project is up and running it is much less likely to be stopped!
Organisation tip #3
Start collecting incidents of wastefulness and underused surplus assets. You know, those surplus assets that are lying untouched in a loading bay somewhere, or on top of a skip, or outside getting wet in a yard. Take plenty of photos, because these are visual justification for your project.
When you execute that first meeting plan, and the subsequent events, you want to paint the picture with visual stimuli that show the system is currently broken. You can explain how the system is broken using these photos, and people are very likely to want to get on board when they see casual wastefulness. Be a storyteller.
What happens in our meeting plan?
Download it and find out!
Ok, so, we will ask questions and analyse, with ideas such as ‘What’s good about the current system and what’s wrong with it?’, ‘What opportunities are being missed and how can we grab them?’, ‘How can we save time and money with reuse?’ and ‘How can we improve the whole system by implementing reuse practices?’.
For each department we analyse the questions above, so you can build a really compelling case to introduce or improve a reuse programme, and this all comes from the invaluable experience we have from working with over 250 large organisations just like yours.
