It seems that we live in a culture of meetings. Some office workers, according to the Harvard Business Review, like the status and social interaction that only a calendar completely full
with one-on-ones, lunches, monthly meetings, quarterly off-sites and weekly status
checks can provide. The problem is that few of these meetings are actually productive.
Likely the meetings on the calendar have too many people on the invite
list, no clear agenda and worse yet—no actionable results. Recent statistics show that pointless meetings are becoming a trend:
Office workers spend an average of 4 hours per week in meetings. They feel more than half of that time is wasted. Opinion Matters, for Epson and the Centre for Economics & Business Research May 2012
The #1 time-waster at the office is "too many meetings, up from No 3 in 2008." according to 47% of the surveyed. Salary.com 2012
You have control over the meetings you schedule. Do you want
to be the one holding meetings that no one shows up to? Or would you like to
keep your meetings productive with active attendance?
Take these things into
consideration and give your coworkers and employees a great gift—time back in their day:
Do we actually need
to meet?
Could I accomplish my objective if there wasn’t a set time
to discuss this on the calendar? Many times a few quick hallway conversations
are all you need on an issue followed-up by an email. Instead of just firing
off that meeting request from your desk, walk over and talk to the people you
need answers from.
Do we need to decide
by committee?
I’ve sat through meetings where evening events for
conferences were debated, videos were dissected for minutia and themes were
discussed at length. If you’re running events, secure input from a few key
stakeholders and then let the masses live with the decisions. Chances are
they’ll be thankful that they didn’t have to weigh the pros and cons of having
a dinner at the House of Blues versus the Hard Rock Hotel.
Make sure you have
the right people
Instead of inviting all 20 people to a meeting who MIGHT be
needed, why not assign the appropriate owners? If you don’t know whom to
invite, reach out to the department head and ask them to assign a
representative. Have the representative send a back up if he/she is unable to
attend.
Be clear on your
objective
Resources are limited and your coworkers are busier than
ever. To make sure people will attend your meetings, be very clear on what
you’d like to discuss and the outcomes you hope to obtain.
Keep meetings short
Time is money. The longer you hold a meeting, the less time
there is to do actual work. Instead of scheduling an hour meeting, why not
start with 30 minutes? This will force you to be concise and get to the point.
You will also encourage attendance if team members know that you’re being
considerate of their time.
Next time you’re about to send that meeting request—you
know, the standing meeting with 10 invitees and no set agenda—consider some of
the above tactics and turn your meeting from a productivity waster into a productivity enhancer. Your colleagues
and employees will thank you for it.
