The Number One Time Chewer: Meetings
According to a widely quoted study ‘The Science and Fiction of Meetings’,
“it’s estimated that the average US worker spends approximately 22 years of their 45-year career in meetings.”
If you accept the argument that around a third of those meetings have no real value-add, over a lifetime that represents 7 years of your life in meaningless meetings, or 16% of your professional career…
Imagine what else you could achieve with that time. And when it comes to company-wide productivity, low value meetings engaging staff in non-productive tasks are chewing through your company’s resources.
Without a doubt, meetings play a critical role in information share, decision making and company communications. But the unwritten protocols around meetings allow them to go on for longer than they need to. Or for meeting invites that land into your diary just because the organiser wasn’t sure who was empowered to make the decisions. Or because your presence would add weight and importance to their campaign or project.
Often, approaching the relevant stakeholders privately for an informal chat asking the right questions could move a project forward without the need to get 20 people in a room.
As Leader, there is an opportunity to re-write the House Rules. Here are some possibilities:
1. Ban the slide decks
We are all familiar with the phrase ‘death by PowerPoint’. And we’ve very likely experienced it ourselves at some point. So, are long visual presentations that go from slide to slide really necessary?
Consider the time it takes the presenter to put the slides together. Could that time be put to better use? But also, despite all the advice and training, most people still cram too much information on a slide – which in turn means there is a small lecture to give while walking through each point. And a high probability of ‘losing’ the audience along the way.
Plus, does everyone in the room need to hear the same information? Could the organiser achieve more by engaging with smaller sub-groups in a more relevant way?
Question the need for long-winded presentations in your organisation. Instil a culture based on finding more time-savvy, more immediate and less formal solutions aimed at reaching meaningful milestones without the need to gather people in a room and demoralise (and probably irritate) them with well-meant but ineffective slide decks.
Hear more about avoiding ‘death by PowerPoint’ from David Phillips in this TEDtalk.
Set a company-wide time limit on meetings
The longer a meeting goes on for (and the more bodies in the room), the more chance there is that the dialogue will go off on a tangent.
Lead the way by setting a company-wide objective to keep meetings to 30 minutes. This will:
· allow access to the key stakeholders’ diaries more readily
· keep the focus to a few clear objectives
· override ability for time to be used for exchanging pleasantries
· encourage people to arrive promptly
· eliminate the need for food and drinks to be provided to keep attendees fuelled (and eliminate the expense of that)
· create a culture of respecting peoples’ time as valuable
A collective meeting might still be needed, but making sure people are prepped in advance to arrive ready to answer specific questions and make decisions, this time limit can be achieved.
Be prepared to drop / walk out
So you have answered all the questions you were asked, and you listened to the update you requested, but the meeting organiser still has another 50 rows of their spreadsheet to go through on the conference call. Do you stay on the call knowing your ‘presence’ is adding weight to the discussion, or do you politely make your excuses?
Leaving meetings that are no longer relevant or where you are not directly adding value means using your time more efficiently and productively elsewhere. So simply and politely leave a meeting that is not relevant to you. And by doing so will encourage your staff to do the same.
And if these simple strategies help you claw back just a tiny percentage of that 16% of time spent in useless meetings, know that you have already made a considerable positive impact on the productivity of the firm (as well as your life).
Now re-imagine that time being spent in more fulfilling ways, both professionally and personally…
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Footnote from Sue:
Early in my career I had a boss who taught me to schedule time to ‘walk’ the firm’s buildings and create opportunities to ‘bump into’ or drop in on the key people I needed to talk to. I formed better one to one relationships with people, and that helped me in the important meetings because they supported me at key moments. But I was also able to gain the commitments and decisions I needed, often without needing to pull a meeting together at all.
In a later job, a senior executive commented on my ‘across-departmental’ approach and started to encourage his staff to act in the same way – informally and crossing departmental barriers.
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So what do you feel is the biggest time-chewer in your work world? What strategies do you routinely employ in order to reduce time wastage, both for yourself and for your staff?
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