Why Meeting Culture Has Got To Change
It’s yet another manic Monday. The dreaded beginning of the work week. You arrive at the office and grab a cup of coffee. With a few good sips of the fragrant, rich brew your brain begins to immerge from a thick gloom. As your thinking becomes more and more lucid you start skimming through the emails in your inbox. You notice one meeting invitation and then another and another. In total you have already received ten meeting invitations and it’s only the start of the day. Do you say yes or no? If only you could act like you didn’t see them? I don’t really need to be there, you think to yourself but then you click accept.
You’re not alone in grappling with whether or not to accept a meeting invitation. According to one survey by Steven Rogelberg, a professor of organizational science, psychology and management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, among employees surveyed about 18 hours a week on average was spent in meetings and only 14% of invites were declined even though they preferred to back out of 31% of them. That means that employees spend nearly half the work week being unproductive because of feeling forced to sit in on meetings.
You have likely reluctantly gone to noncritical meetings and found your mind drifting or thinking about how it was a total waste of your time to be there. Or maybe you got to work on your grocery list. Not only is it a waste of time for employees but just think of how much of a money waster it is for your company to not allow you to bring your full talent to the table. In the survey mentioned above, it was found that $25,000 per employee annually was wasted due to noncritical meeting attendance. For some companies, total dollars wasted is approximately $100 million a year.
Clearly meeting culture just has to change. Here some brief suggestions to help team leaders and companies to make the adjustment.
Reduce the size of meetings. The organizer should ask himself or herself whether the entire team really needs to be present or if the topic only directly concerns one or two people.
Hold collaboration sessions. When there is a challenge to be solved or a new strategy to be developed, get the critical members of the team involved in a collaboration session. This saves the company money in the long run by getting to solutions in less time than it would by holding endless meetings.
Hire a skilled facilitator or train a team member in facilitation. Keep the team focused and heading in the right direction with a facilitator. Good facilitation ensures less tension, greater inclusion and better outcomes.
Be the change you want to see. Let’s say that the time for your team to make changes has not yet come, try to implement some of the tips that you have been learning in this newsletter. For example, offer to do the standardized note taking for meetings so that it can be clearly seen that doing so greatly contributes to retention of relevant points mentioned. You you never know. You could be the one to get the ball rolling in the direction of improved collaboration.
Thanks again for reading and in the meantime, happy collaboration!