Several of my past projects have indicated that meetings – particularly ones with unclear objectives – are a complete waste of time. In particular, it’s amazing to me the number of meetings businesses have and if people are even meeting for the right reason.
I understand concepts of group-think and collective action but action will always be taken at the individual level driven by larger group-think and then needs to be synchronized by the bigger group.
There are six main reasons from my experience why meetings fail:
- They don’t involve people in collective input and action. Many are ridiculous “all-hands/status” meetings that push information on how well things are going or other kinds of performance information that can be accomplished via a report, email or video. Most people participating in these meetings are just receiving information which has no immediate impact on an individuals immediate task at hand – it’s just status reporting.
- They don’t focus on the right decision to the made. Many a times, there are meetings about assumptions or “what-if” scenarios of a customer need or want. Many a times its about reaching out to stakeholders or customers to get their thoughts, needs, or wants and this should be fairly straight-forward dialogue.
- They don’t clearly set expectations. Meetings should be about quickly getting together and then breaking apart to actually get work done – like a huddle in a football game to call a play. The playlist should be understood, the mission should be understood and the agenda items to be discussed should be clearly understood. I am not sure of the value of working meetings unless all key stakeholders impacted from the action are involved. If you make decisions in the best decision of the end user you will have faster meetings that can be executed. The big problem with this is that there are more decision makers than “worker bees” in meetings, that the time to get things done takes a while and this computes to being a “big waste of time” for those attending.
- They don’t have the right people at the meeting. Three points here. First, if the right people can’t make a meeting – don’t have a meeting. Second, I don’t know how many foolish managers think they can have a meeting without the right people. Third, with geographically dispersed team members including those not on the same floor or same building, meetings can be a hassle.
- They don’t understand the role people play and time involved in a meeting interfere with larger work tasks. For example, I find it funny that inefficient organizations are blind to the fact that they pull people from highly-efficient driven tasks where people are spending 100% of their time 8 hours a day – to a meeting where the same person is driving the creation of a PowerPoint deck and contributing 10% of their thought to the construction of a deck for 4-8 hours driving by backseat “driving” through other relevant stakeholders. This is a complete waste of time making organizations inefficient.
- They interfere with actually getting work done towards the mission of the organization. The problem is most people need to go to more than one meeting a day. What happens: they just go to meetings and don’t really do any work. When it is time to do work it is time to leave for the day. This is why middle-managers and delegators are in the most dangerous labor population segment. They make decisions and delegate to others for action without actually doing any work – and when attrition times comes around (if at all) – executives will keep those folks around that act and don’t talk.
So, enough of my cribbin!
What are we going to do about this? Well, let’s start by determining why we are going to meet. We have meetings all the time. We meet someone for coffee. We bump into and meet someone at a party. We meet on at the soccer or football game.
So, what makes a business meeting different than a social meeting? Afterall, aren’t social meetings more fun to attend than business meetings? I think so. In my opinion, Social meetings have several distinct characteristics:
- They are based on the liberty of our free will to attend while business meeting are a “must attend”
- They result in some concrete personal objective – like a party to socialize, a sporting event to get entertained, a date to meet someone who could be your life partner. In business meetings I am left clueless afterwards asking my self “why did we even meet?”
- They contribute to increasing our level of satisfaction or happiness in most cases. Yes, some business meetings may be very fulfilling but most are just random get togethers with a few people talking and making decisions while a bunch of people just sit, participate, and listen without doing anything.
Ok, so what do we do about business meetings? Well here some suggestions that will increase your level of output for consideration:
- Limit meetings to those that focus on the decision to be made. If you are making more assumptions about an action you think you need to take – freeze – reverse track and just ask the source (i.e., a key stakeholder or customer) about what is needed or what you need to do.
- Have meetings with just the people you need to get the job done or make the decision. The non-talkers and listening-participators can just do work and not attend.
- Meetings should be quick and painless. If several people are meeting for a whole day revising PowerPoint slides this is a poor way of operating. You should have a specialist doing this level of work. If you have an issue quickly diagnose it and figure out what action needs to be taken and which staff member(s) needs to execute the action. You need the right players to diagnose problems, prescribe solutions, and determine who will execute the solution to the problem. The staff member will immediate break away from the meeting and re-prioritize his/her to-do list to perform the action.
- Go in to meetings with the intent of dividing and conquering rather than collectively building. In real engineering, design-based corporations collectively group-think is necessary but most functional tasks can be divided and conquered in silos and then brought together. It’s better to build a service-based solution taking small chunks divided up where people contribute than spending the whole day and taking time away from key tasks to build the small chunk.
- Meetings should have a clear agenda that should be quickly followed. Status meetings from all members are pointless as they take too much time. Instead status meetings should be modified to discuss issues/risks and allow engagement via dialogue, not monologue.
- Have a clear list of agenda items to be discussed and keep it short – if possible. A meeting with too many agenda meetings isn’t a meeting – its a waste of time. You need to meet to quickly figure out what needs to be done. If it is a huge list of agenda items this is wasting the time of everyone in attendance.