Time Bandits
Ever sat in a meeting and wondered, "is this really worth my time?” Meetings are often characterized as one of the most painful events and yet they provide underestimated opportunities for efficiency gains in running a business.
Meetings are an important part of running a successful business. Meetings provide opportunities for networking, emphasizing and reinforcing teamwork and sharing information - especially in businesses that rely heavily on shared resources and remote employees. On the other hand, meetings can also be a time bandit, potentially draining a company’s productivity and interfering with achieving maximum efficiencies.
To realize how much meetings are eating up your productivity, let's do the math. First, look at your calendar over the last 6 weeks and add up the hours spent in meetings. Next, figure out how many hours a day on average you typically spend in meetings. Now, let’s make an assumption as to the average hourly cost of the human capital/resources involved in those meetings (one good rule of thumb is to divide the salary and overhead costs of the business by the FTEs and use it as an average cost per man-hour). For easy math, let's say it's $100/hour with 6 people on the call, adding up to $600/hour for the total value of the meeting. As facilitators of meetings, we must ask ourselves if we are wisely investing the company’s treasuries when comparing the outcome of the meeting to the funds invested to achieve those results.
After conducting an audit of our meetings, I challenge everyone to audit not only the meetings you host, but those you participate in as well. Consider for example:
How long is the meeting? Calendar systems often default to 1 hour. Is 35 minutes achievable?
When does it typically occur?
Is it on a regular schedule, reactive or often rescheduled?
What is the pain and cost of rescheduling a meeting?
Who attends the meeting? Jeff Bezos is credited with the suggestion that one should only hold meetings when absolutely necessary and shouldn’t invite more people that you can feed with a pizza or two.
What is the purpose of the meeting? Can you clearly define the purpose of the meeting in a sentence or two?
What is the typical agenda?
Do you make decisions in your meetings or are they for information sharing?
Will decisions be made? The best meetings result in action.
Ask yourself the next time you schedule a meeting whether it has a clear purpose, with the right participants discussing the right things and what decisions need to be made. Then after your meeting, ask what was discussed, what was decided, and what needs to be shared with whom.
Here’s to more productive and meaningful meetings!