Live a life meeting-free
On how to immediately increase productivity in most businesses by reducing internal meetings.
“Let’s have a meeting about this”, “Are you going to the meeting?”, “I’m in meetings back to back”, “Send me a meeting invite”: there you go, 4 sentences that can spoil my legendary good mood.
There is an interesting discussion trend going on mostly in the IT and lean-start-up world: eliminate internal emails and eliminate formal internal meetings. I like that. A lot.
Let’s highlight the exceptions to the rule early on: in some cases, meetings are part of the core activity (medical research, some parts of academia and the very few involved in the actual creative process) little or no escape there, sorry, but it is a rare occurrence, not the rule.
For the overwhelming majority, especially in small and medium sized organisations, my advice is: get rid of those meetings!
Meetings are expensive
Here is the magic formula: multiply the number of people in a meeting room by their hourly rate (or proportion of), add the time/cost spent in finding a suitable time and a big enough room, the meeting room, refreshments if applicable, throw in any printing costs for handouts, etc..
Result: you usually get to a very high $ value.
Is the investment worth it? Measure the outcome of each meeting versus the cost of hosting them and you will find that this is an expensive way of conducting business. But is it the only option?
Meetings are a waste of your time (half an hour, really?!)
If you — like the 83% of us — use a standard Calendar app, such as Outlook Calendar or Gmail Calendar, you will notice that subconsciously all meetings tend to last 30 minutes or more. Why? Because your software breaks up your schedule in half-hour segments.
Well, this seems trivial, but the direct consequence is that our mind works in chunks of half-hour meetings: we tend to use up the allocated time even if the actual “effective playing time” is much less.
The “Retail” school of meetings
We ought to learn from retail: when I was a trainee manager at Tesco, almost two decades ago, we used to do a shop floor round every single day. It wasn’t a “meeting” but it was an actual get together and walkabout the store: review the issues at hand while looking at the shelves and customers in action. “Feel” the problem at first hand and off you go. The meetings would last anything between 7 minutes and 30 minutes, “Hello, how are you?” and let’s get started.
No Outlook, no coffee and biscuits. Pure efficiency.
Meetings and morale
Inclusion, exclusions and dynamics of meetings have an often negative impact on your team’s morale: with confidence and motivation going, so efficiency and drive go too.
How do you feel when your boss tells you “it’s OK, you don’t need to be in this meeting”? Sometimes it bug you, right? Sitting on the bench on issues or projects where you have worked directly on and could offer a somewhat meaningful contribution can lead to something like… “oh well, I’m not going to work that hard next time if they take all the credit. And anyway, what are they talking about in that room? I hope they are not looking at restructuring the team or worse, maybe they are not happy with my work, oh well…I’ll be leaving soon anyway”.
Meetings are like mirrors
Do meetings really favour ideas exchange and communication? I’m not sold on that idea. Meetings often offer a window of opportunity for frustration to be released, for digressions into philosophical twists and turns, for schemers to play the career-advancement-plot cards…rarely meetings are about teamwork.
All-day team meetings can often turn into daydreams over a PowerPoint Skills Festival. How does all this add value to the organisation and if value-added there is at which cost does it come?
Multi-tasking is not for me
I can’t do two things at once, everyone knows that, so I’m terrible at talking- writing, listening- writing, watching-writing…all things we do in a meeting basically. Hence, I leave the room and unless I spend 10–15 extra minutes typing up a follow-up email or taking things down on OneNote, most of it is gone or significantly reduced in scope and value in a matter of hours.
I like when things are written down to the point that when there is a presentation with a lot of content in it (another ‘don’t’, we’ll come on to that in another article too), I switch off reading the slide and the person talking fades in the background like music in a fancy hotel elevator.
>>> The way forward
“There you go another king of doom and gloom speech thank you very much”.
No, believe me, it’s all with a purpose: I have a more or less clear idea in mind on how to counterbalance the negatives above and it is the meeting-free way-forward suggestions, below:
Create a “No meetings” culture
Create a corporate culture in which meetings are not seen as an unofficial performance indicator of people being busy and productive. Do not encourage, on the contrary openly discourage if needed, closed-door meetings.
If you feel extreme: ban meetings and lock meeting rooms during selected high-pressured times. For example, no to non-essential meetings during the month-end process for key Finance staff.
If you have something to say, say it on the “battlefield” and move on.
Do not be afraid, it will surely be an unpopular move and you will not be the flavour of the month, but carry on and it will pay dividends.
“Shop floor” style get together
Have a corner of the office equipped with a flip chart or a whiteboard and a big pen. No chairs.
Don’t use meeting rooms for teams daily/weekly get together: around the flip-chart, standing is more effective. I bet people will be more concentrated and participate more.
Keep what has been written down visible if it is important. Take the notes and use them to replace those cheesy motivational posters from the 80’s the “inspiring”, the “teamwork”, the “customer is king” with pictures of happy random people.
If meetings are a necessity, charge for them
Sometimes internal meetings are an evil necessity, in this case someone’s budget has to pay for it. Charge, charge and charge:
Charge the department that has asked for meetings: time is an investment;
Charge by 10 minutes segments (easy to work out from an hourly rate) and not as one-off or by one hour slots;
Many companies do already charge for the use of meeting rooms, which in essence is saying the same thing: you are using scarce resources (time) and you are investing in it, the cost of that investment will be allocated accordingly.
The rule of 3 (people)
There should not be more than three people in a meeting room. This is to ensure participation, engagement and relevance.
If you have 20 people in a meeting, it is a conference or a training session. Not an operational meeting.
Yes, board meetings and shareholders’ meetings are different you would say and you are right, but these are one off non-operational events and can hardly be considered ‘internal’.
Capping the number of participants to three has many advantages, some obvious and some more embedded.
For instance, a “3” configuration helps in reducing if not eliminating idle and silent. Similarly, participants will have the tendency to filter out the non-essential talks and the hidden agendas as (1) feelings tend to flow more freely in a confined space, hence a higher risk of direct confrontation and (2) in a small room the participants will be more carefully selected and there will less of a ‘chance of a lifetime to shine’ type of attitude.
Many-to-One
Do not have a meeting full of people and one person on conference call: the room will talk for the benefit of that one person. Unless that person on the other end of the line is God, no one should have a meeting room full of people to report to a single person not physically on the phone. Don’t even get me started on the “can you hear me” or “can you repeat that”. Terrible. The “Many-to-One” setup does not work.
I’m not against technology, I use video-conf. and Skype on a daily basis, but the effective use of technology needs to be embedded in the day to day life of the office. Not as a one off and not on uncharted territory (hotel rooms, stations, etc.).
Agendas and action points
I recommend that agendas are sent in advance at all times. Not simply one or two words (e.g. Review Clients) but real sentences. This will ensure people come prepared and on subject, something like for e.g.:
Client Profitability Review > please refer to the schedule here (Link). We will be talking about Client X and Client Y as priority, this is 45% of the decrease. For the remaining please JS (initials of person) on Client B and PB (initials) on Client Z. Highlight update 3 min per Client max.
Meetings and procrastination go hand in hand.
Don’t follow that slippery slope: a meeting should have few quick-wins action points and no “JS to ask PB” type of action. These should have been anticipated.
If any quick-win follow-up, ensure this is done by the end of the day or lunchtime the day after for late meetings.
For any longer terms plans and follow-ups, make sure a tracker is in place and shared with all the participants. Ensure that set and clear action points are circulated and agreed deadlines are in place. Use trackers to follow-up.
Conclusion
That’s it: you are now meeting-free. Joking, of course: reducing or eliminating meeting is like changing the way we eat.
Diets don’t work, healthy eating does: start by applying a few of the above suggestions, the ones that ring the bell, and see if your body reacts well.
Stick with what works for you and your team: in a few weeks you will have eliminated the surplus without noticing it.
Let me know how it goes.
Free to share and republish, please credit the author Roberto Zambelli (roberto.zambelli@3003consulting.com) and the source.
Roberto is a management consultant specialized in project and change management, lean management, audit and investigations. He is also the founder of the upcoming internal audit platform #kob and its siblings.
Available for speaking opportunities and writing collaborations.
