by Cody Hodge

Created on: May 11, 2010

When you are at work, it can be common place to have to solve problems. A good employee is going to be able to not only do their job, but be able to solve problems as they come up. Sometimes employees can't solve problems on their own, or maybe the problem that needs to be solved is a personal one between two employees. How do you set up a conversation at work that can solve problems and get the job moving forward again?

The best thing to do is identify what parties are being effected and what their input is. This means getting everyone into the room and making sure that each person has a chance to offer input and a solution to the problem. If the problem is a general business issue such as how to cut costs or improve customer outreach, the management and possibly an employees who specialize in those areas should be in the meeting.

After getting all the correct people into the room for the meeting, there needs to be an open discussion where everyone can offer input. There is no point to letting someone come to a meeting if they aren't going to be allowed in the discussion right? The goal here shouldn't be to control the flow of the conversation, but just get as many facts and ideas into the mix.

Once everyone has had a chance to talk, there should be some sort of action plan put together. What ideas seem to be more workable than others, and what are we going to do going forward? This might be a time where the management sort of pushes through the agenda here because it will be there butts on the line if anything goes wrong at this point.

When the agenda has been established and the plans have been made, it should be followed through with. There should be a follow up meeting scheduled to determine the success of the last round of ideas to see what has worked and what hasn't. It should be on all employees to follow through with what  has been established regardless of who came up with the plan.

As long as everyone has some say in some part of the process, it shouldn't be a big deal to actually follow through. Compromise is a good thing and everyone should be able to voice input in a problem that could effect the entire company. This is how a problem solving meeting can really get results.

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