Meeting Madness Part 1
Ever stabbed your leg with a pen or pencil in a meeting because you felt it was a waste of time and energy for you to be there? Well I can’t say I have gone to those lengths, but I can certainly appreciate what it feels like to be in a slow-paced meeting that seemingly goes nowhere and I am sure many of you do too.
In fact, almost 75% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient and nearly 66% say meetings come at the cost of deep thinking. Not only this, but what about the number of meetings! Some people are regularly in back to back meetings and can’t find time to do their work until the end of the work day.
Are meetings a necessary evil or is there a better way? Let’s consider this five step process to bring about improvements to the way your organisation conducts meetings.
- Survey people in the organisation to find out where the problems are and how this impacts them in their day to day roles. (Will deep dive into survey focus areas and questions in the next article).
- Come together to interpret the survey results as a team to analyse what is working and what is not.
- Agree on collective and personally relevant objective/s for how to change and improve and what shared success looks like. Here are some examples:
a. To get people to be more focused, turn off phones and email devices.
b. Set some meeting free periods where no meetings can be scheduled.
c. For regular meetings allow people to have a free pass not to attend on set occasions.
4. Create milestones that need to be achieved in the new regime and monitor progress towards achieving the milestones.
5. Regularly debrief as a group to take stock about how people are feeling in the new environment and to make sure that the group does not regress back to the old ways.
“Stop the Meeting Madness, How to Free Up Time for Meaningful Work”, Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noohan Hadley & Eunice Eun, Harvard Business Review, July – August 2017.
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