Moving people forward, together

MeetingZero

Your team’s digital meeting facilitator

TM

If you want to know the zeitgeist of an organization, attend a few of its internal meetings. Nine out of ten times, you’ll see room for improvement.

If you want to be agile, or whatever you were told you have to do to become customer-centric and move fast, start by fixing the way your teams hold meetings. This is a surefire way to improve how groups of individuals across your organization interact, make decisions, and organize their work.

For context, let’s start by looking at the following data reports:

Unstructured group discussions that lead to no action items, with 89% of respondents suggesting poorly organized meetings being their #1 cause of ineffective synchronous group meetings.

Many meetings simply suck up time throughout the day, making it very hard to get meaningful work done with lengthy decision-making processes. Regarding level of irritations while in meetings, survey responses suggest interrupting each other at 50%, 46% said talk about nothing for long periods, 49% said people do not listen to others, 68% said they are losing time to do actual work, 33% said relevant people are missing, 28% said too many people in meetings, and 76% said the most effective way to have a meeting is face-to-face.

And, according to 47% of 3,164 workers in a salary.com study focused on workplace time drains the number one time-waster is “too many meetings”, with 44% of respondents suggesting poorly organized meetings means they do not have enough time in the day to get their work done and 43% suggesting unclear actions lead to confusion. Sources: https://blog.lucidmeetings.com/blog/fresh-look-number-effectiveness-cost-meetings-in-us, salary.com, and https://www.lucidmeetings.com/state-of-meetings-2020

One person does all the talking. Everyone understands the problems differently. No tangible outcomes are produced, and another meeting is needed. Meetings like this are excruciatingly dull to be in, but also fail to do their main job: Providing alignment and clear next steps for a project, an experiment to test, etc. These inefficiencies cost an estimated $400 bn a year in the US. Data is based on average of two hours per week of pointless meetings, and previous slides are based on data from 2019.