Practice #1 for Better Meetings: Cancel it!
I guarantee that while reading the next 4 posts, you will learn how to have significantly better and more effective meetings.
One of the biggest complaints of managers today, regardless the size of their companies, is how they have to hop from meeting to meeting while they don’t have time left to doing the job they were actually hired for. Unless after hours — of course, when you should be investing in quality time (also known as “sleep”). If you have not been in the position of being a manager (yet), imagine being pushed/dragged from meeting to meeting — whether you like it or not — while 40% of these meetings are considered not productive and don’t meet with their intended goals. If they had goals to start with. And if you think for one second that incoherent meetings are the worst … think again!
Over the years, as a IT- & business consultant I have spent too much time attending non-productive meetings. I got frustrated one too many times and decided to try to actually do something about it. Therefore, I would like to share with you my 4 best practices on organising less, but better and more productive meetings. — Pieter O. → yes that’s me — I just quoted myself in the 3rd person.
I present to you: the Recurring meetings!! [% HORROR SOUND EFFECT %]
Most of the recurring meetings are informative. Basically, it comes to this: one person wanting to share (periodically) gathered information with a specific group. This, ladies and gentlemen, is what they invented email for — yes, in 1971. During these meetings, maybe, some people are allowed to give feedback. This, my fellow optimists, is what they invented enterprise social networks for. Or collaborative spaces that centralise this top-down information which you can access whenever you need it. And you can even leave some comments while you’re at it.
Let’s continue to best practice #1.
#1: Determine if the meeting has to be held at all
You don’t need a masters degree in mathematics to figure out that most meetings are not very cost efficient. Let’s take $500 as the average internal cost per employee per day. That’s almost $65 per hour. Meetings of 12 people (or more) are not exceptional. To give you an impression, $780 would be the cost of that one hour meeting — if ending on time.
Ask yourself — do we have to have this meeting?
How about a Ferrari as a company car? Let’s make that 4.
Take into account every employee spending and average of 1.3 hours per day in meetings. Holidays excluded, we have more or less 240 working days per year. If we scale this up to 100 employees, the average cost of having meetings would be $2.000.000.
TL;DR: about 40% of all meetings are a waste of time | $65 is the average internal hourly cost of an employee.
That’s $800.000 wasted, every — single — year.
You do the math. Consider this as a warning sign: if you have to try to come up with a topic to talk about when the meeting starts, that’s often a good indicator to not have that meeting at all. Too many people schedule a meeting and next, try to come up with what is supposed to be discussed during this meeting — we’re not there to serve the meeting! The starting point should be to utilise meetings to serve organisational objectives; deliver added value.
Are we having this Friday meeting because we have this recurrent Friday meeting — OR are we having this meeting to meet with a clear objective?
Utilize people’s time well. It’s precious.
Key Takeaways
Think before planning that next meeting — will it be useful?
Think about what you could spend $800.000 on, per 100 employees.
Meet with clear objectives
Don’t start a meeting without reading best practice #2
(will be published on September 8th, 2017 — stay tuned!)
