Have you been wondering how to get more work out of your staff? There’s one easy way: Stop having meetings.
In a survey last year, nearly one-third of 300 Canadian senior managers said their biggest pet peeves about meetings were events that started late and ran long. Among other pet peeves were unnecessary meetings and attendees looking at their mobile devices. The survey was conducted by Accountemps, a Robert Half company.
In the United States, unnecessary meetings cost the economy $37-billion a year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics once estimated.
As Copyblogger’s Sonia Simone recently commented, “When multiple times a month, I get an auto-reply saying ‘I’m in an all-day meeting,’ your company is broken.”
The basic fact is that while workers are in meetings, they are not accomplishing their work.
Still, we can’t kick the meeting habit. Despite all the statistics that show meetings are a colossal waste of time, they continue to be scheduled. And yet sometimes we need teams of people to co-ordinate what they’re doing, or to plan something that needs to happen.
The good news is there are ways to get this done while spending a lot less time in meetings. Here are seven suggestions:
Use a limited, focused agenda. Meetings that ramble on or try to tackle too much end up a confusing, unproductive, overlong mess. Don’t try to solve all your problems at once. Instead, keep it to one theme and leave other topics for another time.
Reconsider regularly scheduled meetings. Maybe that regular weekly staff meeting could be a biweekly or monthly meeting, if there aren’t so many pressing issues to discuss.
Cut the attendee list. Consider carefully who really needs to be at a meeting, and let everyone else skip it. Send them a memo afterward if they need to be in the loop.
Shorten the time frame. Think hard before scheduling a meeting to run more than an hour. Most participants will be completely glazed at that point and won’t absorb much more.
Use the Internet. Instead of assembling everyone at once, which is bound to be inconvenient for some participants, use a platform such as Campfire to collaborate and share views. Many training meetings can be abolished in favour of online-based sessions that workers can take when it fits their schedule.
Send a memo. If the meeting is simply to impart new policies or plans, make a video explaining it, write a post for the company blog or send a good old-fashioned memo.
Reinvent your meetings. Make them engaging and useful. There’s even a new book, The Culture Game, on how to make meetings productive.
Do you have tricks for keeping meetings on track? Leave them in the Comments section on this page.
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