Give the Gift of Time: Stop Scheduling Pointless Meetings

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.