Are you part of the reason why UK business’ are wasting nearly £26 Billion every year setting up and attending un-productive meetings? Yes, £26 Billion. It’s a massive number and yet in 2012 that is the amount that the European Business Review estimated British managers spent in management time; drinking a lot of bad coffee in a lot of bad meetings.
The EBR report (which you can see here) – revealed that only 50% of all meetings are actually valuable and that the average British manager wasted more than two and a half hours of time every week. So, are you attending too many dumb meetings? Or are you one of those responsible for setting them up? If you’re like me – and many I know, you can probably look through your own diary and acknowledge that me, you and everyone can perhaps be a bit smarter about how we all use meeting tools, resources and most importantly of all – the time of other people involved.
If we consider our hourly rates then managing our meeting time is a big component of business cost. In 2012, The Executive Time Use Project, developed by Harvard Business Review & The London School of Economics, estimated that nearly 1/3 of senior executive time was spent in meetings. So how can we ditch the dumb ones and stimulate the smarter ones?
This was a topic we explored in the recent our company Spring Webinar series (you can see the webinar here). And it certainly created some lively conversation and feedback. Of course, I and the team here at our company are not anti-meetings and neither are we suggesting that everyone retreats into a sanctuary with a vow of silence. Far from it – we think everyone gains from sharing and solving things with team mates, suppliers and customers. But we promote the need for better, more productive, more enjoyable and smarter meetings. And that means clicking decline to the requests to attend the dumb ones.
In her 2009 book ‘The New How’, the American author Nilofer Merchant argued that we all now worked in ‘the social era’. We work in a time where personal connections across the business, our networks and openness to ideas and new people is not just a nice to have, they are the real drivers of success. And, Merchant acknowledges that that we need good meetings; to generate ideas, create trust, manage the pace of projects, develop new connections, set direction and create solutions. But too often – as the EBR research shows, our meetings do not deliver.
We are seeing people being more creative with meetings. In addition to using audio, video calls and screen sharing, some meetings are ditching the meeting room altogether. Meetings are being held standing up in corridors and even out of the office completely with a walk n’ talk around the local area.
Many organisations and researchers have looked at what makes for an effective meeting and after reviewing some of the best ideas, we have summarised these down to our FIVE Laws Of Smarter Meetings.
1 – The Law Of The Agenda: No Agenda? No Owner? Then No Meeting. Best practice suggests that if a meeting invite does not have a clear owner, a clear agenda with a clear purpose, then it is not going to be effective use of time.
2 – The Law Of Procrastination: Decline Meetings Set To Make A Decision Or Share A Report. Meetings are great to share ideas, build solutions, update on progress and make recommendations. But they are not the best process for making a final management decision or simply revealing some numbers and notes more easily sent with a simple email. Don’t let meetings encourage procrastination.
3 – The Law Of Prep’: Send Out Notes And Ask People To Prepare – BEFORE the meeting. If you really want a meeting to quickly get to the point and have momentum – then send attendees your report, background research or recommendation BEFORE the meeting and ask them to come to the meeting with 3 suggestions or ideas they can discuss. If people have not got something to contribute, then why are they attending?
4 – The Law Of Ten: Unless you are running a full on workshop or seminar no business meeting should have more than ten attendees. Allowing everyone a chance to participate is simply too hard if you have more than ten. Again, if people cannot participate, then what are they doing in the meeting? If you need to communicate to a large group – consider a conference of video call to get your message across.
5 – The Law Of Brevity: And Remember – An Effective Call May Be Better. Whilst good face to face meetings are sometimes the best way to do things a well-constructed, well-managed and focused conference or video call can save a lot of time and achieve a lot more. Using modern file sharing and video technologies can build engagement and keep everyone involved – whether participants are in the office, logging in from home or a business trip. And remember – whilst human attention span was once thought to be 12 minutes, the latest research now estimates that this is as low as five minutes (see Social Times piece here). So whether in face or on the phone or tablet, remember the Law of Brevity: keep the meeting moving, keep presentations concise and get people engaged, not snoozing.
These are the Laws that we can see. Do you agree? And what Laws would you like to add?
