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Ask This Question Before Calling a Meeting
Time is valuable, and meetings don’t have to waste it
Everyone loves to hate meetings. For good reason.
For one thing, they’re expensive: Organizations devote copious quantities of well-compensated employee time to meetings. One management consulting firm’s survey found that about 15% of an organization’s total collective time is spent in meetings, a proportion that has been rising.
Meetings can also feel like an obstacle to productivity and creativity: People higher up the ladder tend to spend even more time in meetings, yet a survey published in the Harvard Business Review found that 71% of senior executives said meetings are unproductive and inefficient, and 64% said they come at the expense of deep thinking.
Sadly, switching to remote work, as many organizations did this spring, doesn’t automatically change much. Virtual work leads to less casual office interaction, so people have a tendency to schedule even more formal meetings. That’s a big mistake since there’s some evidence that the slight time delay in videoconferencing makes meetings especially draining.
So given that meetings are sometimes necessary, how can you keep them from being terrible? The key is to ask and answer one question before a meeting:
What crucial change will result from bringing people together, that could not have happened otherwise?
Know this purpose, tell it to everyone ahead of time, and your meeting will be better, whether you’re on Zoom or IRL. Here’s why:
First of all, a specific purpose requires specific people. If a decision can be reached without Joe, then Joe does not need to be there. In general, the fewer people involved, the more productive and efficient a meeting can be. Some organizations have seen time saved by limiting how many people can participate in a meeting without extensive justification. This is not an elementary school birthday party when it’s nice to invite the whole class.
Second, if you have an outcome in mind, you need a way to get there. This seems simple, and yet one survey found that about two-thirds of meetings lacked an agenda. People meet because it is Tuesday at 11 a.m. and that is when they always…
