Meeting Mania

We know that meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation between teams and organisations; They strengthen relationships and ensure proper exchange of information. But with such social advantages, why do they so often get so soul sucking, monotonous, sleepy and dull?

Older studies showed a person nearly spends 23 hours per week in meetings, whether formal or informal, in-person or online. The stats now further show, especially after the pandemic, a significant increase in their length and occurrences (keeping the impromptu huddles separate). Moreover, time wasted in meetings account for 15% of an hour-long meeting, where the factors are (to name a few):

Late-comers,

Lack of preparation and poor agenda,

launching a video call/AV issues,

Inviting too many/unnecessary people,

Straying off-topic/letting people talk too much,

Not diverting longer discussion into follow up meetings

When you come to think of it, those wasted 9 minutes of an hour-long meeting are actually 9 minutes wasted of all participants each, and every minute spent (or wasted) in a meeting is time not getting something else done. According to Cal Newport, professor of Computer Science at Georgetown, a calendar loaded with meetings interrupt “deep work”; the ability to focus without distraction on a task that requires conscious cognitive activity. As a result, people tend to come to work early, stay till late or utilize their weekends for focused time to concentrate on such tasks, and eventually suffer from work-life imbalance, increased burnout, decreased creativity and efficiency.

That’s why minimizing the wastage is such a big deal. Productive meetings are a great thing and there has been written a lot about the solutions, however real improvements require more than just an individual effort.

Striking the Right Balance

Unfortunately, individuals can’t solve this problem on their own. Just think how many times you’ve tried to reduce the number of meetings on your calendar — but with little success. Because so many people are involved in scheduling and conducting the meetings we attend, it takes a collective effort to fix them.

With a structured approach, we can make significant improvements in changing meeting patterns throughout our team and organisation.

1. Establish a clear agenda
Always set a clear agenda before the meeting and make sure to pass it through all the attendees. An effective agenda sets clear expectations and helps team members get on the same page.

2. Keep meetings short
In addition to making meeting purpose clear and specific, it also helps if the meetings are kept short, between 20–30 min long at average. Short meetings can yield major outcomes; everyone is aware of the limited time they have and it naturally stops people from going off-track.

3. Invite strictly relevant people
Time is money; it actually is. Each minute of a team member is charged (adding up to their monthly remuneration) if you come to think of it and no company wants to waste $$$. Therefore, only keep people in meeting who are actually important for that discussion.

4. Designate a note-taker
Always assign someone, can be yourself, as a note-taker who records all key points and share the minutes of meetings with those attending.

5. Last but not the least — always start, be and finish on time! Respect everyone’s time.

Meetings and discussions are inevitably necessary, so we have keep trying to improve and optimise them so they actually give us amplified outcomes and make us look forward to having just another one! :D