Make meetings work with 6 science-backed tactics

Whether you're sitting, standing, huddling or sleeping, meetings are not something you look forward to. Most of us grin and bear the interruption to our day. But (as I say in all my posts) at what cost?

There are lots of estimates on how much time we lose to meetings. Anything from 50-60 hours a month seems pretty standard. Look at the previous four weeks in your calendar and add up how much time you spent in meetings (let me know how you fare in the comments). CEOs get the worst of it, losing around a third of their time to meetings (see WSJ chart to the left).

The real kicker? (which will surprise no one)

Most meetings are ineffective. One white paper found that 47% of employees viewed meetings as the biggest time waster in the office, which led to them daydreaming (91%), doing other work 73%, and sleeping (39%).

Source: Atlassian.

This article explores the impact of meetings and suggests some strategies that might help your team win the war against them.

Timing is everything

In 1955, Cyril Northcote Parkinson (below right) joked in The Economist:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion."

Parkinson's Law should be the first reference when planning a meeting. That is, if you schedule a meeting for 30 minutes it'll go for 30 minutes but if you schedule it for 10, it'll go for 10. Here are a few timing rules to lessen the waste.

20-minute should be the gold standard, not 30. If you're not planning meetings around people's ability to focus, then you're doing it wrong.

Research shows that we can concentrate for around 20 minutes. But we can increase our span of concentration if we find the task enjoyable or we're intrinsically motivated. Sooo... most meetings should go for 20 minutes.

Make it the default. Digital calendar platforms have done us a great disservice. They've standardised 30-minute blocks. While 30-minute blocks make it easier to schedule your day, losing 10-minutes per meeting adds up over the weeks, months and years. If you reduce 4 of your daily 30-minute meetings to 20 minutes, you gain 20 days a year. Voilà!

It's inefficient to tinker with the start and end time for every meeting you schedule. Here's how to make 20 minutes the standard: Outlook (here), Google (here), Lotus Notes (I have no idea).

Don't drain your team's best time. Most people do their best work in the morning. After lunchtime, our productivity drops — it death-spirals after 4pm.

Most meetings don't require all participants to focus intensively, which makes the afternoon the perfect time for them. By scheduling meetings in the afternoon, you're also putting pressure on the chair to pull everyone through their daily lull with engaging content and communication.

Change needs to be organisation wide. Reducing the organisation's addiction to meetings takes clear directive. Luckily, it's a reasonably easy win -- in the history of humanity, no one has ever wished for more meetings.

Whether it's implementing Meeting Free Fridays or similar initiatives to refocus on work that matters, it needs to be driven from the top. In 2012, PwC Australia's CEO, Luke Sayers, banned meetings between 10am and 4pm with this short email to staff:

“My ask of you [is] to reduce non-client demands on each other’s time, with the aim of making the hours of 10am to 4pm client and market time, not internal meeting time." ... mic drop [mic drop added by author]

Should you stand or sit (or ride)?

For just US$12,500 your team could be having bike meetings.

Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull, recently exclaimed,

"They say sitting is the new smoking!"

Turnbull was musing about his standing desk but the same might be true of meetings. In their Bob Marley inspired paper titled "Get Up, Stand Up: The Effects of a Non-Sedentary Workspace on Information Elaboration and Group Performance", Knight & Baer found that standing during meetings increased teams' performance by:

1. Boosting excitement
2. Increasing creativity
3. Higher quality output
4. Reducing turf wars.

Or in academic speak...

We propose that a non-sedentary workspace increases group arousal, while at the same time decreasing group idea territoriality, both of which result in better information elaboration and, indirectly, better group performance.

<head scratch>

Standing up also makes people more aware of their boredom. Bluedorn et al. found that sit-down meetings lasted 34% longer than meetings where participants stood. This is a pretty easy way to cut meetings from 30 to 20 minutes but what will you do with all the unused chairs?

Invite attendees like it's your wedding

If you've ever been married (or even hosted a party) you know what it's like to be selective about an invite list.

The reason we're more selective with party invites than meeting invites is it that we're accountable and (very) aware of the cost.

Estimate the cost of your meetings. The good people at Havard have us covered, here's a calculator estimate the salary-related cost of each meeting.

Is there a better way? Once you've got an idea of the cost of your meeting, think about whether the benefits outweigh the cost. There's no better line in the English language than, "I'm giving you an hour of your day back."

Conclusion: Don't forget your free lunch

150 years before Friedrich von Wieser formalised the idea of opportunity cost, Benjamin Franklin coined the adage:

"Time is money."

Ain't it the truth, Benny!

Time is zero-sum: the time you lose to unproductive meetings will either delay the progress of your important work or (more likely) will absorb your leisure time. So next time you're preparing a meeting invite, think about its cost. Once the cost of the meeting has washed over you, try to adjust the time, timing, format and attendee list to lessen the impact on your long-suffering colleagues.

Benjamin Franklin after receiving a 1-hour meeting invite.

Luke Hurst is the Managing Director of Building 20, a Melbourne-based productivity consultancy that delivers data-driven evidence-based programs that help teams reduce workplace distractions and increase productivity.