In most businesses, we are accountable for every hour we work, every dollar we spend, every resource we use. You would not travel for business and refuse to submit receipts and expect to get reimbursed, or build a plan for a new project and refuse to estimate its cost and benefits, would you?
Yet we ask people to commit time, money and resources all the time with little to no expectation of benefit or gain. These crazy management projects are often called meetings.
Yes, I am back on the meeting high horse today. The Wall Street Journal yesterday (3-6) has an article on how corporations are trying to change meetings to make them more productive. Probably my favorite quote in the article was "A lot of people come to us and say I have no idea why I'm in those meetings". So, in many cases, people are attending meetings where they can't add value, don't take value away and aren't willing to just leave if they can't add value or learn something.
The article states that a recent survey found that an average employee spends 5.6 hours in meetings each week. Throw in prep time and wrapup time and that number probably extends to almost 8 hours a week. And frankly, in my experience, that number is low. But for the sake of argument let's use 8 hours as a baseline. Let's postulate that an average worker costs a business in salary and overhead approximately $100,000 per year fully loaded. This means the average person spends approximately 400 hours (50 weeks * 8 hours per week) in meetings. That cost is approximately $22,500 for the fully loaded worker. Note that in an average work year (say 2000 hours) almost one fifth is in meetings. In a medium sized firm of 100 people, over 400,000 hours of time is spent in meetings based on this math.
For this investment, are we getting any benefits? If in an average sized business I wanted to commit 400,000 hours of personnel effort, I'd have to provide a strong rationale for how that time would be used and what the benefits would be. But since we use this time in small units scattered across the organization, no one bears the responsibility to determine what benefits the company received from this investment.
Anecdotally, however, we can identify the value of meetings. How many meetings do you attend where you leave knowing that you've accomplished something in the meeting? How many where you learned something or contributed something of value? Could it be as high as 50%? If so, let's use that as a baseline. That would mean 50% of your time in meetings is not valuable or "wasted". In the example above, this would mean 200,000 hours of time that could be directed to other activities. Could we find ways to use that time more effectively?
Meetings are one of the few activities where a person can require the participation and attendance of others without a real justification or value proposition. It has become almost de riguer to attend a meeting once invited, so few people miss a meeting they've been invited to, even if there's little or no value for them. The cost of these meetings is astronomical and the benefit in many cases unproven or non-existent.
We should create a tool which allows people invited to a meeting to express their 1) interest in the meeting 2) the value they think they can add to the meeting 3) whether or not they think a meeting is necessary (could this be handled some other way) 4) what their expectations are to receive from the meeting in terms of benefits. It might be possible to do away with some meetings, hold smaller, more topical and specific meetings in some cases, and improve the definition and expected results of other meetings.
Finally, when you hold a meeting, think of the value proposition to the folks you invite. A meeting should hold value in terms of learning or decisions or results for those that attend. You need to make it perfectly clear that if someone in your organization is in a meeting where they can't add value and don't see benefit for themselves or their team, they should be free to leave, no questions asked. In fact, in your invitation to a meeting you should be required to say "Attendees of this meeting will receive the following benefits - a, b,c". If you can't define the benefits then rethink your meeting. If you allow people to attend based on the benefits they receive, only the people who really care will attend.
And that might result in more work getting done and a more effective, productive culture.
Comments