I recently attended a meeting, and as everyone departed, I heard one of the participants say, “What did we accomplish in there?”
Another attendee replied, “I can’t remember anything.”
If this is how your company’s meetings are perceived, then you need to re-evaluate how your team is spending it’s time.
Is your company guilty of meeting instead of working?
Meetings with No Results
Meetings in most companies are broken.
There is no simpler was to say it. They are a waste of everyone’s time, and incur the company countless costs. (Salaries, lost productivity, missed opportunities, lowered morale … just to name a few.)
Many companies would be better off cancelling most of their meetings and letting their team get back to work.
“Stop holding meetings, and let your teams get their work done.”
Meetings are one of the biggest time wasters in corporate environments. In most companies, anyone can call a meeting about anything.
Wasted time abounds…
- Meetings called by individuals trying to look busy.
- Status calls organized by people who were avoiding doing their job.
- Even meetings because a manager was lonely. (True story… you can imagine how productive those gatherings were…)
In work environments like these, group gatherings become the norm, and work takes a second place to sitting in conference rooms.
Stop Meeting and Start Working
Before you lock yourself and others into yet another hour (or two) long meeting, ask yourself what the purpose of the meeting truly is. Make sure there is a known purpose and that is will produce tangible results.
What will be accomplished? Is it really necessary to meet? Would a phone call or email be a better option?
Instead of locking your co-workers in a conference room, let them get back to work and produce results.
Ensure you don’t waste your company’s most valuable resource: time.
Question: Does your company need to stop meeting and start working, instead? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
I used to work at a university in an IT department. The department gathered once a week for 90 minutes. At the high water mark that was 25 people in the room, or 37.5 man hours a week in a meeting. The meeting was simply a review of each persons task list/projects or announcements of new projects to be doled out.
Ridiculous when people had certain tasks that every two weeks or month were complete, so they got to say, “Complete” and have that item checked off. Only to start that same project with the same 2 or 4 week turnaround. Then there were the network and messaging admins where a project like rolling out new production storage for the VM environment would take close to a year, so the update was simply, “waiting for proposals”, “reviewing proposals”, “submitting proposal for approval”, waiting on PO, etc.
Some staff looked efficient while others did not, yet the tasks were so dramatically different, and not even the department head could grasp this. Darn near a week of time per meeting wasted, when we could have used that wasted cost to hire an additional person. Or better yet, allow us to work and cut us a pay increase.
And as the article states, we all wondered if anything useful came from the meetings. Actually once every 6 months we might find a cutover or network change would impact some other project. Seems a huge waste of time, where an email announcement of the changes to network would trigger a colleague to notify network team this would impact their project negatively. An email, and it was done, but nope.
Great points! I hate meetings! I described them like this “…a group of unproductive people, sitting around a table with other unproductive people, discussing how they wish everyone else would be more productive.”
Original post here = http://goburrows.com/the-most-important-meeting-of-your-week/
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