Are many meetings wasting your employees' time?

How are you spending your time? / photo courtesy flickr user wwarby

I was speaking at a conference two months ago when a woman stood up to tell our session a story. The story supposedly had a happy ending, but it isn't quite so happy, if you think about it.

We were lamenting how much time was spent on meetings. She said that she'd run an analysis on her calendar and figured that, before any given month started, she was already booked for 100 hours of meetings. If you figure that a workweek is 40 hours, that means that 100 of 160 hours was consumed by standing meetings. Forget emergency meetings and the like. These were just meetings undertaken in the normal course of business, and that no one was forced to continuously justify.

The happy ending was that she took this number to her supervisor, and shared it with her colleagues, and everyone agreed that it was ridiculous. The department got rid of a few standing commitments and freed up 30 hours per month.

Of course, that still left her with 70 hours of standing meetings.

That she was grateful for the improvement should give us all pause. But it got me thinking. When is the last time you and the people you work with have conducted a "meeting audit?" Have you looked over your calendar and calculated how many hours are booked before people have even been able to evaluate what matters and what does not? Does this make sense as a percentage of overall time? Or are you wasting your employees' time -- and hence potential productivity -- just because meetings accumulate like piles of mail if no one pays attention?

How many hours do you and your team members spend in regularly scheduled meetings each week?

[jonathanallen10]

Very insightful article and post. Thanks for sharing. I have passed this one, and have posted on my blog. I think we should be careful not to swing too far to the other extreme. I've seen groups have so much distaste for meetings that they stop collaborating altogether, and then both communication and culture break down. Meetings can be a valuable tool for making decisions effectively. The question should be - what's the purpose (e.g., what decision(s) are we trying to make)? who needs to be there? does the meeting outweigh the costs? Cheers, - J

[lvanderkam]

This is true too - collaboration is important. The problem with standing meetings is that the meeting winds up happening simpy because it's on the schedule, rather than because something specific needs to change in the world by the end of the meeting. If there isn't a decision that needs to be made, the meeting is probably a waste.

[FormerUSMCSergeant]

My experience in large corporations is that meetings are all about someone's ego. 99% of what's offered can be effectively dealt with via memo's without wasting hours and hours of time.

I don't miss that stupidity one iota.

[lvanderkam]

Yes - meetings are not your job. They are a tool to do your job. Sometimes people forget this. Ideally, things should be managed well enough that you don't need a meeting every Monday to learn that, yep, everyone is still doing her job.

[WiseAsOwl]

Yes.. You are correct... I'm no longer involved in such things so I think I have a more objective viewpoint than those who are still directly involved in such stupidity.. I could mention several other aspects...like transportation costs to get people to and from meetings. What's really wasteful is that those at the top of the totem pole often require lots and lots time from their busy staff to make preparations just so that executive can try to give impressive presentations at these meetings.. It seems to me that lots of the executives feel that they need these meetings to produce an image of taking an active part in managing the company... you know...the typical "Too many chiefs and not enough Indians" syndrome...