Top 5 Reasons Why Meetings Will Die

Last week we made a case for why believe meetings, as we know them, will die. Today, we’ve outlined the top five reasons meetings are a waste of time.

1. Meeting are Poorly Planned

“Hope for the best” is not a successful meeting strategy.

When meetings are poorly planned, it results in a variety of undesirable outcomes. A poorly planned meeting is often characterised by having:

• No defined agenda
• No defined goal for the meeting
• No one owning the meeting agenda
• Unnecessary participants in the meeting
• Conversational tangents

More often than not, meetings are organized with a “hope for the best” strategy, but a poorly planned can lead to a waste of time for most, if not all, participants. Even worst, they can garner few results and leave employees and managers coming back to the same questions they had in the meeting before. This leads to major costs for the organisation, from dollar spent on employees time to more indirect opportunity costs.

For example, let’s assume each employee had an average hourly wage of $200, a 3-hour leadership meeting with 10 people would cost $6,000.

This hypothetical is not uncommon. In fact, “ineffective and unproductive meetings cost U.S. businesses $37 billion every year (Sheridan, 1989; Sisco, 1993).

2. Technology Created Issues

100% of the employees we asked, across market leading companies, confirmed that technology played a role in their unpleasant meeting experience.

A second problem, our research uncovered, relates to the technology component of meetings. Most organisations use some type of technology — e.g. Skype, Blue Jeans, WebEx, Phone or something similar.

Technology is supposed to be an enabler for productive meetings; a tool that can make meetings more convenient, and, ideally, promote a better outcome. Unfortunately, the use of technology often contributes to a waste of time in a meeting in three key ways:

• Issues setting up the meeting
• Bandwidth and video connectivity issues
• Micripohone and camerea device issues

In our interviews with industry-leading firms, interviewees were asked to think of a meeting from the previous week. We then asked if anyone experienced problems with technology during that meeting.

All 15 interviewees confirmed that technology had been an issue in the meeting.

Some of their comments were:

• “We always have problems with the technology and it usually ends up with people having to call in twice or more to connect” (Funderbeam, 2017)
• Well, today 2 of the 3 people did not have sound for the first 15 mins (Google, 2017)

From our interviews, we learned that in any given 30 — minute meeting around 7 minutes are wasted for various technical reasons.

We found that technology accounts for the most waste once the meeting has started. Usually the time wasted comes from setting up presentations, finding the right cables, connecting with people in other locations, making the connection work or troubleshooting a connection.

Almost 25% of an average meeting is wasted because of challenges with technology.

Another study by Fresh Business Thinking (2016) is backing up this finding “overall the research shows that the causes of the most meeting stress (87%) are technology related” (Fresh Business Thinking, 2016).

3. People Don’t Show Up or Show Up Late

Another variable that contributes to waste and inefficiencies during meetings are people showing up late.

Meeting participants showing up for meetings late causes a variety of problems; it interrupts the meeting and it forces the facilitator to repeat what is already stated before moving on.

Back in October 2011 Rogelberg et al published an interesting paper with the title: “Lateness to Meetings: Examination of an Unexplored Temporal Phenomenon”.

Rogelberg and his colleagues (Rogelberg et al, 2011) asked the study participants to report the number of meetings they attend and give an estimation of the percentage of time they arrived late for a meeting.

Besides the quantitative data that was collected the participants was also asked to provide qualitative feedback about how they perceived the consequences of lateness to meetings.

The findings of this study support the idea of lateness being a key issue in meetings. Based on feedback from 195 participants in 331 meetings the study revealed that:

• Nearly 37% of all meetings started late
• The average meeting delay was 15 minutes
• 70% reported being late to meetings

It is especially interesting that the researchers found that turning up late to a meeting led to “negative mood states among those who had already arrived (e.g. feelings of frustration and being disrespected), as well as poor perceptions of the late comer, both of which could have negative flow — on effects to things like team performance, creativity, and cohesive relationships” (Comensens, 2014).

In another recent study, it was found that 95% of workers attend meetings a few times a week with an average meeting lateness of six minutes.

In a situation where each worker attends four meetings per week, that equals 864 minutes lost each year.

If we take those numbers and apply it to a workforce of just 50 that is a total of 950 hours wasted every year waiting for meetings to start (Fresh Business Thinking, 2016).

Then imagine if we were to do that calculation on the American workforce.

Being late to meetings might appear to be a trivial aspect to look at. However, having the numbers in mind presented above meeting lateness can provide a significant challenge to any organisation.

Not only does it waste everyone’s time, but it also contributes to coworkers thinking less of each other for showing up late.

4. Scheduling Time Between Attendees

Another area that usually contributes to waste is scheduling meetings with coworkers . Depending on the situation of your coworkers, finding availability across a team of busy individuals, can turn out to be one of the most significant challenges.

In our research, we found that scheduling meetings with coworkers came with various levels of issues;

• coworkers being too busy
• not having enough meeting rooms at the office and,
• finding availability with teams that span across various time zones.

One of the people we interviewed, put it this way: “Yes, we always try to find open spots in the calendars but it’s time consuming to find suitable slots” (Skyscanner , 2017).

The problem of scheduling a meeting is amplified when teams are working remotely and across time zones.

What happens when you have a team members in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia? It becomes even more difficult to find availability and have that valuable face to face time.

When talking to one of the senior product managers from Stack Overflow he said: “Finding an open spot in everyone’s calendar is a challenge. I’d say that availability is the most challenging thing for us because our overlapping working hours are almost non existent”

He then followed up by saying:

“It only works because the majority of us works in Europe. I have 5 hours where I can have that valuable face to face time. Without those 5 hours of overlap we would really struggle” (Stack Overflow, 2017).

The problem our interviewee explained turned out to be a usual one that most remote teams were finding to be a challenge.

5. A Lack of Focus During the Meeting

The meeting has been scheduled, all technology related issues has been fully or partially fixed and everyone has arrived at the meeting.

Previous sections have highlighted that this initial setup process contributes with a significant amount of waste. If the value of the meeting however outweighs the cost of the waste one could argue that it’s still valuable for the organisation. As we unpacked the research done around meeting engagement it seems like the meeting itself is a vehicle for waste.

In a study from 2014 it was shown that more than 70% of meeting participants bring other work to meetings and the same study revealed that 39% of meeting participants admitted to dozing off during a meeting (Meeting King, 2014). Interactive Associates (2004) did another study aiming to understand how people behave on conference calls and meetings conducted online. The two studies were similar:

• 90% of people on conference calls said they multitask
• 70% reported doing unrelated work
• 50% reported email or texting
• 35% said they muted the meeting line to conduct side conversations
• 25% said they surf the web

The results are clearly pointing in the same direction; meeting participants are multitasking and focusing on other unrelated work during meetings. But, is this happening? And how come meeting participants multitask and focus on various other things while having a meeting?

In our research 3 obvious reasons came up:

• The meeting is not relevant for them
• The meeting is only partially relevant for them
• The meeting has been scheduled at a bad time

Previously it was mentioned that 15% of the collective time in an organisation is spent on meetings. Up until now the research we have presented has revealed that most of this time is waste. The initial planning and setup of the meeting but also the meeting itself.

Conclusion

Based on interviews with 15 pioneering companies and several other research studies it is safe to say that meetings, as we know them today, are broken.

Too much time is wasted in and outside meetings. As presented in the previous section, it’s not only one, but multiple aspects, of meetings that are contributing to waste.

As outlined above the problem is that what is supposed to be an engine of productivity becomes an engine of waste and organisational challenges that ends up costing a lot of money.

We are not the first people to discover the significant amount of waste meetings are generating. That is also the reason that you will find hundreds of companies in the marketplace that are trying to solve the issues individually.

You will find companies that are trying to make the planning phase of meetings easier. You will find companies that are trying to solve the technological issues by allowing better and faster communication online with video or chat.

You will find companies that are trying to automate scheduling meetings. Even though these companies are developing vastly different products they all share one common characteristic;

Each company is trying to invent faster horses when, in fact, what is needed, is a brand-new car.