Better meetings - Why you should care and how to make your next one way better

Why you should care

Imagine the following scenario:

• Your company has 10'000 employees
• Your average pay is 77'000.- USD per year (that was the median US salary in 2021)
• You just did an analysis and found out that employees spend 60-70% of their time in meetings
• You do the math: Your company spends somewhere between 460 to 540 million USD per year on meetings! ??

How does that sound? The 60-70% come from a conversation I had with a Future of Work leader the other day, and this is the actual amount of time spent in meetings in this organization. The company has some 20'000 employees. As they are in manufacturing, I assumed 10'000 people are white collar. It doesn't matter, though. Even if your company has only 1000 people who spend 60-70% of their time in meetings, we're still talking about some 50 million USD per year. You can do the calculation easily with your numbers. And I would encourage you to really do it! Harvard Business Review even offers a meeting cost calculator.

Now, we all know that meetings are, to put it mildly, not always the most productive use of our time.

As the cartoon above illustrates so well, most meetings are unnecessary, and many people feel like they are a waste of time. Maybe not all. But many. Let's imagine 50% of the meetings are essential and productive; you're still wasting 250 million. Every. Single. Year.

What's more, the direct financial cost of holding these meetings is not the only "cost" to your business. Meetings keep us from getting real, deep work done, make us unproductive, and increase stress.

In fact, a study of 180 managers in a range of industries published in Harvard Business Review found the following:

• 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient
• 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work
• 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
• 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together

The MIT Sloan Management Review published a study on the impact of meeting-free days on variables such as productivity, stress, engagement, cooperation, satisfaction, etc., and found that already one meeting-free day per week has a tremendous impact. The best results were achieved at three meeting-free days per week. (BTW this article even claims that we spend up to 85% of our time in meetings).

Salesforce recently conducted an experiment: An entire week free of any meetings for all of the company. Some 28000 employees. While 81% of staff said they wanted more of that, only 18% said they would probably have fewer meetings in the future. No meetings at all might not be feasible. Even companies that work fully remote and asynchronous need a meeting every now and then.

In fact, Hubspot conducted a study among some 4000 of its employees. Remote workers, in-office workers, and hybrid ones all felt that staying connected was a key challenge.

Although we can’t, and probably shouldn’t, eliminate meetings completely, I believe we need to get better at them. Especially in a remote/hybrid setting, where “meeting with a purpose” will become ever more critical.

How to have better meetings

Having better meetings doesn’t have to be complicated. Here’s a checklist you can easily follow.

1. What‘s the purpose of the meeting? Think of: Share information, build relationships, make a decision, solve a problem, get feedback, generate ideas, make a plan, reflect and improve, prove how important I am, …
2. What are the pieces of content you‘d need to cover?
3. What‘s the objective for each piece? For example, share, discuss, make a decision, get feedback, improve,...
4. Who do you need in the room to achieve these objectives?
5. Do you need everybody together at the same time, or can this be done asynchronously?
6. Should this be a meeting? Or instead an email or, better yet, a Slack or Teams discussion? Or a shared online document that everybody can collaborate on? (Remember to work in the open).
7. If yes, design your meeting. Think about techniques and plays best suited to reach your objectives while leveraging the opportunity that everybody is in the room (virtually or physically). Think about how to really engage everybody, make sure everyone is heard (remember: if nobody hears you, you didn’t participate in the meeting), capture everybody’s input, make sure to close with a clear conclusion, that could be the decision taken or next action steps. In an effective meeting, there are no spectators – only participants!

Bonus tip #1: If this meeting is crucial and you have a more significant number of participants, consider having a professional facilitator. (Bonus tip #1.5: Facilitation skills should be a required skill for every leader!)

Bonus tip #2: Start your meeting on time! Research has shown that it will be more effective.

In any case, be deliberate about designing your meetings. Don‘t just invite people into a meeting without thinking carefully about the meeting's why, what, and how.

Yes, this will require you to make an effort. But, think about it this way. You investing time into designing the meeting will show your participants that the meeting is important and that you are respectful of their time and make it worthwhile attending your meeting in the first place. They will thank you. It will be good for your image. And it will be good for your business.

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