Turn Your Meetings into Crunch Time
In my last job, I spent seventy percent of my working hours in meetings. Mostly I was running from meeting to meeting. I’ve visited up to four meetings at the same timeslot. Some were full of irrelevant people sitting just like mannequins. Some lasted hours, but worth much less.
I’ve thought ways to minimize them efficiently. Even our organization looked a lot of ways to eliminate inefficient meetings. The Academy engaged pieces of training on the topic, the Internal Communication published hints and tips to discourage unnecessary meetings. IT assigned some automatic arrangements on the calendar. Even the number of meeting rooms were diminished on purpose. No way people gave up.
Some meetings were disastrous with uninvolved blank faces. That environment drained me and built a cynicism that no meeting was helpful.
In fact, meetings mean business. Meeting is a crucial medium to create meaning together. When we meet, we can change the world.
I do not mention the cost of the hyper-meeting environment to the company. According to HBR, in 2014 Bain & Company found that a single weekly meeting of midlevel managers caused each organization the cost of $15M a year! What redundancy!
