Counting the cost: cross campus meetings
It is often said that there is no such thing as a “free” lunch. There is no such thing as a “free” meeting either. While meetings can be highly effective tools, sometimes it seems like we carry on having them without taking into account the time costs.
This is even more apparent if you have to get a cross-campus team together for your meeting. I’ve had to organise meetings for groups from several sites before, and while it’s often clear where to gather, sometimes sitting down and looking at the figures shows just how much time is being lost to a physical meeting.
Here are the shortest route walking times between sites as estimated by Google Maps.
So if your group is made up of people from Alan Gilbert Learning Commons, Kantorowich, John Rylands Library and Joule then it will take approximately 49 minutes for everyone to get to Main if they meet there and 58 if they need to meet at Joule. That’s nearly a whole hour of combined time that people will need to spend travelling before the meeting even starts - and the same will be needed to get them back again.
It also means that it’s possible to spend more time travelling to the meeting than you actually spend in the meeting, especially if said meeting hasn’t been well planned.
So it’s definitely worth considering your options for virtual meetings and sorting things out electronically whenever possible. It’s also helpful to check out whether meeting halfway is possible and trying to make sure that the burden of travel doesn’t always fall onto the same people, especially over repeated meetings.
For the Library Management System Advisory group we have a fairly even mix of people from north and south campus, so we alternate between sites. We also have a very flexible approach to meeting online or even cancelling meetings if it looks like there will be a quiet month or a lot of absences.
If we want to have efficient meetings we need to make effective use of time, and that means counting the hidden costs of travel time.
