Research published today by IT company Parity found UK business professionals spend the equivalent of eight weeks a year in face-to-face meetings.
This is compounded by a lot of other research (from Canada to New Zealand) that comes to the same conclusion: unnecessary meetings have to be the biggest drain on the time, enthusiasm and productivity of business manager.
In a knowledge economy, sharing and discussing information and insights is a critical task, but the situation has become out of control. Highly paid and talented managers have become a slave to a system that in many organisations is inflexible, inefficient and ineffective.
Many of my clients find it difficult to get anything done simply because they spend their days in back-to-back meetings.
They have to take their ‘real work’ home with them in an attempt to keep up with their big issues.
Why do they continue to attend gatherings that are of so little value? They shrug their shoulders and say it’s part of the job.
I believe that many organisations need a revolution in meetings management.
Here are five ground rules I propose for all business meetings:
- Each meeting has an owner — an individual who is responsible for setting, running and following-up on the meeting
- The meeting owner establishes a set of specific objectives and decisions for the meeting, and circulates to those being invited.
- Each of the invitees is free to choose whether or not to attend — there are no ‘three-line whips’. The only side-rule is that the invitees cannot seek to reverse decisions if they’ve chosen not to attend. This will ensure that managers attend only those meetings that are important to them.
- The standard time increment in online diaries is set at five or 10 minutes (why do all meetings have to last an hour?)
- At the end of each meeting, the meeting owner summarises the decisions and actions made and, immediately following the session, sends the outputs to all the original invitees — even those who haven’t attended
Following these rules will free up at least a 100 hours each year for each manager across the UK, and probably significantly more. In particular, ensuring that attending meetings is completely voluntarily will put the responsibility for managing time back where it belongs — on each manager.
What do you think? Do you have any tips on how to avoid meeting monotony?
(Photo: tiarescott, CC2.0)
