Meetings, meetings, meetings

• It is the matter of fact that managers are spending most of time on meetings. With pandemic and crisis, meetings became even stronger burden since the amount of issues and firefighting has increased enormously. I hear it all around, mentioned to be the most devastating condition today. The more and more people talk about Zoom fatigue and being drained by virtuality.

But are all meetings bringing value? I put this question many times to myself, and continue to question many of these arranged by others.?

When you are early in your career, meetings are seen very positively: you feel attached to collective being in a room with your colleagues, you gain alignment to the team, you feel important to take part in something happening beyond your core responsibilities. Meetings happen relatively rare and perceived by junior employees as something meaningful and great. ?

The longer you work and the higher you go, meetings ratio increases and at a moment you realise that your day consists only of those.

When meetings take 50%, 70%, then almost 100% and time from time start to hugely overlap, the idea to go to another one stops looking that interesting.

There is a strong common belief that the best way to get forward with any activity is a ?meeting?. My personal belief, supported by observation and research, is that many meetings are considered to be useless.

I asked myself many times the question ?What am I doing here? This could have been shared through small document and I could have read it in 15 min. Why should I spend an hour? No one asks a question, since content is super clear and obvious!?. I am sure, this or other questions on reasonability of meetings came to mind to many people in corporate world. And I need to regret - my conclusion was always: I waste my time. All the rest in the room as well.

During workshops with Leadership teams, we conducted one exercise.

We followed the time counting over a month. We tracked activities in calendar. Thanks to the tools we could even calculate time spent for emails.

We tried to distinguish, how much time was spent for (in our view) most value added activities and how much for less.

We defined that the most value is coming through:?

• 1:1 meetings with team members (also, needed to say that if a subordinate came for a minute to report an issue it does not really add a value. So we take coaching, feedback, consultation, co-creation time)
• strategic and long-term effect activities?

Unfortunately, we saw the time spent for these accounts around 10% and 7-8% respectively.

Means, that around 80% time are spent for (tried to put it in the decreasing ration of value creation:

• regular sharing
• participating in escalated issue resolution
• regular upward reporting
• cascading information?
• emailing

Here comes the trick: how can Leaders increase the time spend fruitfully with their people and contributing to the strategic initiatives? I strongly believe - by reducing the wastes. This piece of Lean approach appeals me the most.

So, how can we identify which meetings to skip? Some low-hanging fruits for sure are those, where you clearly understand: you neither contribute, nor you receive any valuable input. Just take a breath and cancel it (if you’re originator) or decline your participation.

But not everyone has such a level of consciousness, so here below is the simple algorithm I have developed to recognise the value-adding and waste meetings. I use it myself and I would not mind if you use it as well. I offer you a point-factor system which might help make such evaluation.

?? Try to identify what is the purpose of meeting.

?? How many people are attending?

?? How many people are speaking?

?? Are you speaking?

?? How many topics are in the agenda?

?? Is there any discussion and co-creation?

?? Is there any decision made?

Here are some indicators pointing that a meeting is probably not bringing much value for you or your team.

? It lasts above one hour. Possible exceptions - it is a team building (still questionable value, depends a lot of many factors), a workshop, a hackathon.

? It holds over 3 agenda points. This is the big trouble of those long meetings with numerous agenda points each not more that 30 min, most 15 min. In most of cases each participant is active along own piece (5-15 min, you remember?) and rest is getting bored. And such meetings might last 2-3 hours…

? This next meeting is touching exactly the same content, but for another audience.?

? You have no clue what this meeting is about, even at the moment of entering the meeting room

? This meeting is a follow up of another one where you had no value of participation. You just were ?present?.

? There is no clear purpose and agenda, unless it is intentional team building

Meetings cost to the company exactly the same as time each individual could have spent for productive or creative work.

In fact, meetings are often costing not only time spent by all participants together, but also quite some amount or preparation time.

If the main paradigm of modern business is to reach best possible individual and collective performance, the meetings become great contributor.?

Instead of calling a meeting for several people, quite often it is possible to write an email, or pick up a phone and talk to a particular person.