How to create a better environment for Meetings
One of the main human attributes that are fully-rooted in our dna is the social bond, and although in some of us it gives us better to others, this distinctive attribute of species is not always the right choice or works in the best way when we translate in a professional field. Every entrepreneur says that throughout the first years of any business, they spend more time in meetings than developing products, evaluating them, or what is worse planning. We often think that saying yes to all those meetings is synonymous of improve the business and is even a search for opportunities that otherwise would not be available. The sad reality is that more often than I'd like to say, many of these entrepreneurs end up stuck in fruitless meetings and rambling through small talk with no approximations of real work.
As a result, every business often suffers from the silent impact of these blocks of unproductive time. But, are work meetings a death trap that we cannot escape or avoid? Are they all complaints, and why, if so, are they still made, recommended, or promoted? Is eliminating work meetings an absurdity fact in the face of our natural need to link us together? Well, maybe it all comes down to the use of smart implemented policies, optimizing time-based agendas on real targets, and containing our need to spread out.
Meetings are not productive.
All those who have received a note, an email, or an instant message being summoned to a work meeting, frequently testify to being part of a large group, full of messy protocol guidelines that reduce the real interaction to minutes passed without major impact. A growing share of professionals would agree that the vast majority of meetings do not move the needle in terms of progress. They are usually just a forum for people to talk and share ideas, and nothing concrete is accomplished. Why does this happen?
I have summarized here a brief selection of the most prominent reasons:
Meetings are not productive because people often talk without taking action.
Meetings are often poorly executed and poorly managed
They lack a clear and identifiable goal for all those involved
No specific periods are established based on the urgency of the topics
Very often, massive participation is sought, losing interest for more than 70% of attendees
The infrastructure of these meetings is usually monotonous and monogamous.
There are not after published testimonials, nor are group agreements shared
Well, we are barely scratching the surface, but the case goes much further, that even the dynamics of this type of meeting are opening the doors to a number of studies. A study carried out by Dr. Joseph Allen, director of the Center for Effective Meetings at the University of Nebraska, indicates that. “It is normative in our culture to look down on meetings and empathize with people when they have meetings… Casual conversations are often dominated by people complaining about a meeting, things that happened in the meeting, time wasted in meetings, etc. ” What a comment right?
Have you heard the famous quote that sometimes the best things come in small packages? this theory is not entirely far from this problem, in July 2013, the professor of organizational psychology at Harvard University, J. Richard Hackmande concluded that four to six members are the best size for a team to handle most of the designated tasks and discussions, and past this number, the risks of dispersion, friction, and low-performance increase exponentially.
Too much time to plan, too little time to do.
Proper planning can help you avoid costly mistakes. But excessive planning can just as easily lead to paralyzation. If you spend too much time in meetings, planning ideas instead of working on them, you're probably not using your designated time effectively.
The illusion of meetings is that they can feel productive. You leave a meeting feeling like you've accomplished something because you've talked about what needs to be done. But in reality, all you have done is talk and put it on the table, many times even these issues do not even reach the stage of discussion and discernment. And I'm afraid to tell you, talking doesn't get the job done.
The impact of meetings on a negative ROI
The return on investment (ROI) of a meeting is the ratio of the value obtained from the meeting to its cost of it. The cost of a meeting includes not only the time spent in the actual meeting but also the time spent preparing for the meeting and following up after this. These last two are rarely contemplated with the necessary seriousness. Then you need to multiply that cost by the number of people who attended. If you have a 1-hour meeting with 10 people, you are wasting 10 hours of production. In most cases, the ROI of a meeting is negative because the value gained from the meeting is less than the cost of holding the meeting, and in this case, the math doesn't lie.
Time is the most valuable thing you have in a business, so you have to be very careful about how you spend it. But, how to remove excuses like the following from the equation, that meetings are essential because they provide clarity, set expectations, and achieve alignment within your organization. But in reality, there are much more efficient ways, cleverly speaking about the use of the tools that fortunately we have at hand today.
Here are some of the most terrible scenes at every meeting:
We are invited to a meeting without a clear agenda communicated in advance. We huddle in a conference room with our team members and wait for the meeting to start. Once it starts, we see that the person who called the meeting struggles to explain to the group why we are there. After 30 to 40 minutes, a resolution is reached (hopefully), but before starting what has been discussed, a potential date for another meeting is already being discussed to complement the one that has just ended. A quite crazy thing, right?
Small, big recommendations:
The meetings are, in my opinion, a glorified excuse to put into practice a terrible communication skill. Most topics don't really take 30 to 60 minutes to discuss. In fact, most topics could be discussed in less than 5 minutes if each part were condensed into a more effective message.
Instead of relying on flexible, somewhat scattered, and vulnerable face-to-face communication, try improving your complementary communication talents by forcing yourself to use the following tools (many of them, riddled with ways that even allow you to measure performance):
Email
SMS
direct messaging
Phone call
Final considerations
At the beginning of this article, I ferociously lambasted the outdated need for face-to-face meetings, especially those oriented to work and in more detail those that are made in a stage of entrepreneurship, but I must be honest, it is not a radical appreciation of extermination, it is a recommendation that suggests a more considered use to a human problem. Try to have effective and efficient meetings, and by this, I mean a meeting that includes the least number of people possible and that it brings together a group of people carefully selected for a specific purpose, focused on the main topic of the meeting.
Determine if you really need it, is this meeting a priority for your organization or is it a review of something already seen and discussed? The need for some meetings is legitimate, others are not. Meetings should never be held for the sole purpose of sharing information.
At a minimum, a meeting should focus on a discussion that will be more effective in real-time than asynchronously, via emails or comment threads. Examples include team or project retrospectives, brainstorming, and 1-on-1 meetings between managers and direct dependents.
In a study focused on the budgetary burden of a meeting, the corporate consultant Bain & Company, managed to determine that an average meeting in a "finely calibrated" corporation can represent up to 15 million dollars per year, draining almost 80% of the motivation and performance strength of its employees, exhausting them greatly. Imagine this reality inside an organization without a solid structure. The panorama is heartbreaking.
At its best, the purpose of a meeting is to make a decision or create something collaboratively. Project planning, mapping customer journeys, setting goals, and yes, solving a problem. This is probably the most efficient way to do it.
Finally, I can share some points that I consider important when it comes to having a proactive guide to generating efficient and effective meetings:
Create a clear, selective, and brief advance agenda
Delegate the management work to all members of the meeting. (Each one must have a task, from the one who will take notes, to those who will describe the agenda)
Standardizes the subsequent decision process. Once we reach a conclusion, what will we do?
Categorize your meetings between (and this is just optional) Informative, Decisive, and Follow-up
Try to have them carried out in morning blocks (the energy is much more active at this time)
Minimize the time needed. If your meeting requires more than 45 minutes, then it is already a gross organizational error.
Determine the cost of meeting hours. Time is money, don't forget that.
Respect the time of your colleagues, friends, and partners by starting on time, finishing on time, that's the most respectful way to be considerate of everyone's schedule. Nothing ignites creativity more than finite resources.
