One Thing About Meetings

Standing meetings in the workplace have a tendency to meander. Often the opening three minutes of social “catching up” becomes 20 minutes. Then there are the tangents we invariably wander off on. Don’t forget about discussing lunch plans, and weekend get-togethers. Before you know it, an hour has passed with no real business getting done.?

Consider the cost of a meeting in people-time. If you have 12 people in a room, then each minute of the meeting is consuming 12 minutes of total staff time. An hour meeting is costing you 720 minutes, or 12 hours of staff time—the equivalent of one person working for a day and a half. When you consider the price of work time, meetings are costly endeavors. So come to a meeting focused on something. The Apostle Paul tells us in Philippians 3:13, “Brothers and sisters, I myself don’t think I’ve reached it, but I do this one thing: I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me…” Paul narrowed his focus to?one thing.?

Set a single goal.?Agendas are helpful and nothing beats a taskmaster to hold the meeting to strictly work. Sadly this is most often not the structure of a meeting. One simple way to improve every meeting you lead is to walk in with a Post-It note with?one question or goal?that you need to get out of the meeting time. Open with the one thing that you must accomplish. If you reach other goals in addition, that’s great. But if your meeting wanders, you’ll have that one nugget of team input that will help push the day forward.