Are Meetings Killing Efficiency- 5 Steps Efficient Operation
What is a meeting? Too often it is an event where one person at a time gets up and speaks about something that many of the supposed-to-be- listeners have little or no interest. People attend this event because they been told they have to attend because their attendance was “MANDATORY” or they just wanted to justify their time at work while not doing real work.
Business in our society is no doubt meeting-driven. We have meetings about everything; especially in larger organizations. But does every announcement really require a meeting? We’re getting to the point where we’re having meetings about having meetings. Many of us have been subjected to the weekly waste of time some companies call staff meetings where you leave wishing you could have brought some work in with you.
Let’s monetize the cost of a meeting- Imagine you have 20 people coming to a meeting and 10 of them have to travel 30 minutes from a different site. Let’s say these meeting participants produce at a rate of $150 per hour. Just from the 10 people who have traveled a total of an hour to and from the meeting you lost $1500. If the meeting lasts 3 hours (the average is 2-2.5 hours), that’s another $9000 (or on average 6000 – $7500). The big questing is, are all these meetings being held worth more than $10,000 to the organization? Most meetings are not really worth the $7500 to $9000 they cost the company, so why are they still happening? There are many reasons, including:
- The monetary value is usually not calculated
- That’s the way they are used to doing things
- Lack of awareness that alternatives exist
So what can be done to help this issue?
- 1. Complete a cost/benefits analysis
Before a meeting is scheduled, it’s important to know if it’s worth disrupting everyone’s productivity. You need to know how much that meeting really costs, not just the obvious costs, but also the ones included in day to day operations.
- 2. Explore alternative to meetings
As you consider ways to share and gain information, you should explore alternatives. Are there ways to get the massage to your team without disrupting the flow of productivity? Could this information be relayed in and email? The 4-Sentence Email To Replace Meetings shows how efficiently an email can accomplish what we use meetings for.
- 3. Create an agenda
Once you schedule a meeting, decide exactly what you want to address and the succession of things from the introduction to the end. When you don’t know this information you are more prone to deviating into things unrelated to the meeting and transitioning from one point to the next takes longer. And don’t forget time for questions and discussion are a part of the agenda if they will be allowed in the meeting
- 4. Strategically invite participants
The more people you have in a meeting the longer it will last. One way to avoid too many people is to only invite people who need to be at the meeting. If the meeting is not relevant to some members of your team it’s a waste of their time to have them attend. It will also be a waste of everyone else’s time because they are likely to be less aware of some of the details the others already know and ask more questions.
- 5. Stick to the agenda
One of the main reasons that meetings run on longer than anticipated is deviation from the agenda. The purpose of the agenda is to guide the meeting. If you take the time to create an agenda and distribute it to invitees and give them the opportunity to submit input, then there is no reasons things should be coming up at the meeting. This includes the general input time. If you have 20 minutes set aside for input or discussion, that segment of the meeting should not last a whole hour.
Meetings do have a rightful place in the operation of every organization, but we need to be careful of over-using them. When you start having meetings too frequently, you diminish their effectiveness. You don’t want your team to just attend meetings because they were ordered. Meetings must be something that people attend because it was the most efficient method for the organization to communicate the particular agenda and they gain something from participating. If those two things are not present it may be more efficient to let your staff stay on task and earn money for the company.
I’m just saying though…
Dream Big… Live Bigger…
DrJudiC
www.DrJudiC.com
