If you think that distributing meeting minutes with assigned action items and due dates will make your meetings effective, think again. My long experience is that many meeting participants fail to look at the meeting minutes until the day of the next meeting. (This assumes that the meeting recorder distributed the minutes before the day of the next meeting – another frequent by-product of busy work lives.)
To make meeting follow-up work, you need to develop a culture of accountability that makes it not okay to show up at the next meeting with action items incomplete. Barring a culture change, the meeting leader needs to follow-up with participants regularly between meetings to ensure action items are under way. (Yes, someone cares and is asking.)
