Redesigning "the meeting"

At my last job in the US we desperately tried everything we could to avoid having meetings. We tried a "no meeting day" or tried to establish a rating system to get rid of meetings that received low scores.

In contrast, people LOVE meetings in Tanzania. Why? Because meetings here mean money.

Tanzania has the puzzling common practice of paying people to attend work meetings. They're not paid for being the keynote speaker or even for presenting. They pay people JUST to ATTEND. So, as you might imagine, many of the training sessions or work meetings I've gone to have had many attendees but very little audience participation or engagement.

In response to this, Goodluck and I have tried different ways to facilitate learning and capacity building during meetings for health workers in Kilwa. Traditional trainings occur with large groups in a central location, requiring participants to travel there (and organizations to pay for their travel expenses as well as their attendance). Instead, Goodluck and I travel to them and do 2-on-1, on-site training with workers in the facility for shorter but much more focused and concentrated teaching sessions that we've found to be effective despite the short amount of time we spend in each facility (1-1.5 hours).

Despite the value of the on-site trainings, one of our goals is to build community between local groupings of health facilities as a means of establishing decentralized health management. Therefore, we do include one larger group training session in our training program where we pay participants to attend. However, we call it a Data Workshop instead of training and have designed a number of exercises and tests that have meeting attendees working together on analyzing data and identifying problems. In this way, we force participation and engagement much beyond the traditional sit, listen, collect money, go home that defines the current design of meetings/trainings.

We went one step further in our most recent data workshop this past Tuesday. Though Goodluck and I disagree with the 'payment for meeting attendance' method, we still comply with the culture. After all, it does seem to be a great way to ensure people actually come. However, we thought we could change the way an attendee earned their allowance and increase participant's interest in the material in the process. Instead of getting a flat allowance for meeting attendance, we gave our participants two data tests, one at the beginning of the day and one at the end, and told them that they'd earn bonus money depending on how much they improved (we told them this after they took the first test).

Participants' scores on this exercise had averaged ~2 out of 8 in the past and the first test of the day with this group was no different: they averaged 2.5 out of 8. After explaining our program to them, however, participants were much more engaged throughout the rest of the day's training and finished the second data test averaging 7.5 out of 8 as a group (a 200% increase)! The results meant both bonus money earned by participants and increased confidence in their abilities to improve how they collect and analyze data in their own facility.

On top of that, Goodluck and I are particularly excited about the fact that the district health management team in Kilwa has started to adopt and incorporate many of these practices into other meetings and trainings they run. They were also very interested to hear, and we're eager to report, the outcomes of our "pay for performance (not attendance)" method.

Goodluck and I are always on the lookout for ways to innovate and improve existing systems in our work and redesigning the meeting has been a great achievement for us so far.

Here are some videos of us mid-data workshop!