Misleading Meetings

So many corporate meetings are an absolute waste of time.

One study interviewing more than 6500 professionals found that, in 2019 alone, the cost of poorly organised meetings was $399 billion in the US, $73 billion in Germany and $58 billion in the UK.

Respondents said:

• poorly organised meetings mean I don't have enough time to do the rest of my work (44%);
• unclear actions lead to confusion (43%);
• bad organisation results in a loss of focus on projects (38%);
• irrelevant attendees slow progress (31%); and
• inefficient processes weaken client/supplier relationships (26%).

These findings echo the results of Harvard Business School research from 2017, in which 182 senior managers in a range of industries were interviewed about the worth of most meetings: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.

 The researchers elaborated on just how painful and futile most meetings were:

"In our interviews with hundreds of executives, in fields ranging from high tech and retail to pharmaceuticals and consulting, many said they felt overwhelmed by their meetings—whether formal or informal, traditional or agile, face-to-face or electronically mediated. One said, “I cannot get my head above water to breathe during the week.” Another described stabbing her leg with a pencil to stop from screaming during a particularly torturous staff meeting. Such complaints are supported by research showing that meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. And that doesn’t even include all the impromptu gatherings that don’t make it onto the schedule."

“I cannot get my head above water to breathe during the week.”

 It’s eye-stabbing stuff and I hear it from my clients every day:

 ‘I’d like to spend more time on the bigger ticket items but I just don’t have the capacity, I’ve got so many meetings this week’.

‘I’ve got meetings all day so I’m going to have to come in early and stay back late just to get everything finished’.

‘I’ll try and catch up on emails and empty the inbox in my back to back planning meetings this morning’.

Days of Our Lives meeting culture

This is where your team becomes stuck following the identical script and sharing trivial information week in week out. Steve from accounts does the update on cash flow, Nigel reports on the sales and marketing activity, Sarah inspires the rest of the team about all that has happened in compliance and safety in the past 7 days, Ron talks about how busy he’s been trying to organise the new HR policy and so on. This type of meeting is like watching an episode of Days of our Lives. Week one Bo and Hope break up, you tune in again in week 26 and they’re back together – phew! Then you catch episode 50 at the end of the year and they’ve broken up again. If your weekly meetings are like Days of our Lives where you only need to ‘attend’ a few episodes to work out the script for the rest of the year, you need to make some changes.

High performance starts with getting meetings right

I spend a lot of my time presenting workshops and meeting with executives. I'm often in a boardroom to meet three or four people for a 9am meeting and frequently find at 9.05am that I'm still the only one in the room. A few minutes later I become bored and walk over to read the company values framed in a beautiful mahogany case. Values like 'honesty', 'integrity' and 'respect'. Checking my watch again shows 9.08am, and I'm still alone. And what am I thinking at this point? “This company is full of sh*t. They haven't even read their values.”

Maybe I'm crazy, but shouldn't a 9am meeting actually start at 9am? I spent more than a decade working in the world of sport and learned very quickly that high-performing teams get the basics right, and punctuality is one of the absolute basics that shows discipline, organisation and respect.

Steve ‘Stumpa’ Rixon (former Coach of the NSW Cricket Team) taught me the most important lessons I could ever learn about meetings and communicating in teams. When I worked under Stumpa he commanded a tight ship. “Firm but fair” was his sporting creedo. But you always knew the rules, and God help anyone who was ever late for training. If a fitness session started at 8am, everyone would be there between 7.30am to 7.45am at the latest, ready to start at 8am sharp.

If a player rocked up at 8.01, first they'd get the death stare and then Stumpa would take them to the side and give them a 'special' warm up consisting of high-intensity fielding drills and intervals; players were known to vomit and fall in a heap at the end of this 'special' activity. It didn't matter whether it was an Australian Test player or an 18-year-old rookie, they were all treated the same and the message was loud and clear – turn up on time, all the time.

Former Commonwealth Bank CEO Ralph Norris was known to lock the door after his executive meetings commenced, and too bad if you weren't on time. Rob Blain, former CEO of CBRE Asia Pacific was known to arrive at meetings 10 minutes early and sit in the foyer so he was calm, relaxed and present before walking into the meeting.

In a recent interview with the AFR, Atlassian work futurist Dominic Price said he had culled all of his meetings. “Meetings can kill my productivity, they can kill my time investment, but they can also kill my job satisfaction. My time was this precious resource that I was frittering away on stuff that wasn’t important or impactful. But no one else was going to change that unless I chose to change it.”

Price tried an experiment where he cancelled all internal meetings. “I declined every single meeting regardless of what it was,” he says. “And with it went a decline email that said ‘this is either a boomerang or a stick’.” Price further explained to his surprised colleagues boomerangs come back when you throw them, and sticks don’t. A meeting could be a boomerang – he could be re-invited – but he set some conditions.

Company leaders set the meeting culture, and if they are always late or of the meetings do not add value, this cascades throughout the entire organisation and can literally waste millions of dollars in lost productivity. 

Dollarise your meeting time

1. Work out how much you earn per hour

Calculate this by dividing your yearly wage by 1,824 (number of hours worked each year for a 38-hour week x 48 weeks per year).  

Example: A yearly salary of $100,000 has an hourly rate of $55.

2. How many hours are you spending in meetings each week?

If you are spending 20 hours in meetings each week then the cost for you to attend meetings is 20 x $5 = $1,100 per week or an average of $52,800 per year.

How do your sums look?

The average cost of my meetings each week are:

 The cost for me to attend meetings each year is:

A well run, engaging meeting is an essential part of a high performing team. So let’s look at a few simple rules to flip your meeting culture.

Learning to say NO

If you attend all of the meetings you are invited to there’s a good chance you’ll have no time left for anything else, including your life. Before saying YES to your next meeting request, ask the 5 following questions.

1. How much value will I receive from attending this meeting?
2. What can I contribute to this meeting?
3. What would happen if I didn’t attend this meeting?
4. Is there anyone else who can attend in my place?
5. Is there a quicker way to get the same outcome?

Getting out of the Meeting Black Hole

Even when we feel we have made the right decision to attend a meeting we can still end up in a meeting that limps along. You know one of those meetings where you find yourself thinking ‘there goes an hour of my life I’ll never get back’. Here are some quick tips to taking back control of your meetings

•  No agenda, no meeting - don’t turn up to a structured meeting without one. This helps prepare content and keeps you and the entire team on track and on message
• Start and finish on time - way too many companies start meetings 5, 10, 15, even 30 minutes after the scheduled time. Stay disciplined and start meetings right on time. If key people aren’t in attendance, start anyway and prove the point that from now on we start on time, regardless. It becomes habit to start and finish on time as much as it becomes habit to always start late!
• 5-minute warm down - allocate five to ten minutes at the end of each meeting for ‘additional topics’. Then raise any items that aren’t on the agenda. If you run out of time, then put them on the agenda the following week.
• Meeting chair- with groups larger than five, have a dedicated chairperson. Make sure they are ruthless on time and pull people back when the message gets off track.
• Flip location - swap the meeting location. Having the same style of meeting in the same stuffy room at the same time of week with the same people gets boring. Have a meeting in a local coffee shop or go outside to the park.
• Summarise - keep minutes succinct with an accountability of timelines and who’s doing what. Start the following meeting by checking off the list from last week’s meeting.
• Compress- why do we constantly schedule 60-minute meetings? Is it because Outlook or other diary management software has 60-minute appointments? Be ruthless, stick to the agenda and cut some meetings back to 30 minutes, even less. Then allow everyone to go back and get on with their jobs! 

Meetings aren’t all bad

While this article so far has alluded to the fact that the majority of meetings are a waste of time and money it does not have to be this way. Meetings can and should improve the efficiency of an organisation. They are a vehicle for communication, providing leaders with a mechanism to disseminate their vision, craft strategic plans and develop responses to the challenges and opportunities impacting their businesses. They allow for people to collaborate, share resources and ideas and result in higher levels of innovation.

We need to strike a balance between the positive outcomes that meetings produce with the time, energy and company money invested. It is imperative that organisations implement a high-performance meeting culture.

Turn staff meetings into personal development opportunities

Why not make meetings informative and interesting and use them for staff development? At my business, StriveStronger, we decided to turn our monthly staff meetings into an opportunity for learning and development.

At the start of the meeting one of our team, or an invited guest, shares knowledge through a short and punchy 10 to 15-minute presentation (a bit like a Ted Talk). We all learn something new, the information is relevant to our company, and it generates discussion about how we can improve our services.

"If we can just turn everything we know about meetings upside down—replace agendas and decorum with passion and conflict – we can transform drudgery into meaningful advantage" 

Patrick Lencioni, author of Death by Meeting.

Walk and Talk

When we sit down for extended periods of time oxygen, blood and glucose is not transported as efficiently to our brains. Aim for regular walk and talk meetings to boost your metabolism and fire up your neurons. Studies have shown walking meetings are a proven way to increase creativity and innovation. I try and include at least one walk and talk every workday and make lots of my sales and client calls while I am walking too.

Talk while you walk around a park, oval, by the harbour or around the city. You’ll get some exercise, fresh air and stimulate discussion.

Meetings are always going to be a significant part of the corporate landscape, but they dont have to be time wasting, energy zapping or engagement killers.

If you'd like to know more about our WorkFit Program to help your employees protect time, boost energy and focus attention, please let us know.