This Post could have been a Meeting
The reason for bad meetings is not a lack of knowledge or discipline, but a lack of honesty and excess of tolerance for unproductive behaviour. This loss of productivity results in costs to any organization. Being bold about bad meetings helps to improve productivity.
Recently we discussed meeting culture and discipline in one of our team off-sites. Participants unanimously agreed that there's significant potential in our organization to improve the efficiency of meetings. Start and finish on time, define a specific outcome, stay on track throughout the duration of the meeting and others were mentioned as key guardrails for efficiency. We're all familiar with them, yet we often neglect them.
Improving meeting quality is one of the most effective ways to ensure people's time and resources are not wasted. Imagine you and I worked for the same organization and I would send you an arbitrary invitation for this topic with the following suffix in bold:"Attendance is mandatory!" How would you feel? And still more important: (How) would you react?
It's not about less meetings, it's about better ones
Meetings are invaluable for discussion, decisions, and collaboration. They become wasteful when they are used merely to broadcast information. Nevertheless scheduling meetings to pass information from one person to many others still seems common in many organizations. In the age of mobile internet and AI, requiring people to receive information at a specific time feels increasingly outdated. These conversations are particularly difficult when the meeting owner is a leader, because the tendency to overestimate the value of meetings seems to affect leaders in particular. Hence the problem becomes particularly visible in leadership positions, where meeting invitations often carry additional weight:
1. Lack of feedback: Leaders tend to get less critical feedback from direct reports than from peers or superiors.
2. Span of control: Many leaders tend to invite based on their span of control rather than with regard to the relevance to a specific topic.
3. Status: In some cases, meetings can unintentionally become status signals rather than productive working sessions.
This behaviour has a severe economic impact: Imagine a team of 10 persons spending a total of one hour on average in rather unproductive meetings on a weekly basis. That's over 400 hours a year, which is the equivalent of more than half a full time equivalent. In an organization of 10.000 this could add up to an annual waste of productivity of over 400.000 hours or more than 500 FTE.
Improve Organizational Productivity
What can we do? The goal is not fewer meetings at all costs. The goal is fewer unnecessary meetings and better necessary meetings. We could start with being more honest to ourselves, how we feel about certain meetings we attend foremost for the sake of harmony and to avoid conflict because challenging them feels more uncomfortable than attending them. Once we're clear on our own feelings and thoughts, we could take a bold step and give honest and respectful feedback to the owner of such wasteful meetings. This will take courage, especially if it is a valued colleague with whom we (don't) have a long history of good relationship or if it is someone higher up in the organization. These will not be easy, but valuable discussions and therefore require room and time. But what is the alternative? Sucking it up is a bad option.
Exchange short term comfort for long term productivity
So next time you attend a meeting for no other obvious reason than comfort, ask yourself: "What honest and respectful feedback after this bad meeting am I avoiding, that would most likely add hundreds of hours to our organizational productivity in the future?"
Comments