Have you ever finished a meeting and thought, “Wow. We could have saved a lot of time if we had simply sent an email to the group.”
Instead, 12 people were summoned to a conference room to sit and listen to someone read their homework out loud to the team.
These “bad meetings” are a big productivity waster in most companies.
Look at your calendar. Could your next meeting be replaced with a simple email?
Could Your Meeting Be Replaced with an Email?
Too many meetings are ill-conceived.
Do any of these sound familiar?
- A meeting to read documents to a group.
- A get together because the meeting organizer didn’t do their own homework, so they want the team to do it for them.
- A conference call with so many people that no one bothers to say anything to the audience.
Meetings are for debate, discussion, and decisions. They are not for status checks, recitations, and announcements. (At least not simple ones…)
“Don’t call a meeting, when you could send an email instead.”
Email overload can be a productivity waster itself. However, one of the powers of email is that it allows time-shifting of communication. This allows team members to digest messages on their schedule and prevents meetings that interrupt everyone’s work.
Better Communication Means Fewer Meetings
Most corporate meetings could be replaced by better communication.
Don’t call a meeting when an email will do the job better.
Before you send out that next meeting invite, ask yourself if the topic would be better handled by another medium.
Question: Does your company have too many meetings that should be simple communications? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
My work roles sometimes involve meetings to decide when the next meeting will be. I don’t think choosing the wrong medium for communication is restricted to meetings vs email. I believe better training in workplace communication would help people use the right tools, at the right time, in the right way to convey the intended message. Great article.
I feel that at times meetings are a product of Satan. Ill conceived meetings are time and resource wasters. Inviting multiple people to meetings leads down a rabbit hole and is rarely productive. I often am left feeling that I just wasted an hour ( or two, or three) of my work day that I will never get back. I am professional and don’t need hand holding. Just tell me what I need to do and give me a deadline.