Productive meetings are good for business. They provide a forum to convey information to larger groups simultaneously as well as provide an avenue for brainstorming. However, meetings can also reduce worker’s productivity and eat up a significant amount of a company’s financial resources.
Before delving into how to make meetings more productive, here are some insightful statistics on the same.
How Much Time and Money Is Spent on Meetings?
It’s estimated that mid-level managers spend 35% of their time in meetings. The figure shoots up to 50% for those in top-level management positions. Further, workers will spend an additional four hours per week to prepare status updates for upcoming meetings.
Aside from the time spent in meetings, the costs are equally shocking. Across the US, over $25million is wasted in unproductive meetings, amounting to $37 billion annually.
While it might not be feasible to have a no meeting policy, the goal is to ensure you only have necessary, productive meetings and that they do not eat into your employee’s productivity.
Here are a few tips on how to go about it.
1. Avoid presentations
These take a lot of time to prepare, set up and present. Scrape these out entirely. Instead, have this information emailed to all meeting attendees a day before the meeting.
This allows everyone to review the material beforehand. The meeting can focus on discussing the already common knowledge and reaching possible outcomes. This will cut down the total meeting time which can be channeled towards other activities.
2. Have a dollar figure on your meetings
Figures are rather sobering. Use figures to motivate you into reworking your company’s meeting habits.
Here is how to calculate your meeting costs:
- Calculate the pay per hour of each participant.
- Multiply this figure by the total number of participants.
- Include all travel costs of anyone coming in from your offshore stations.
- Add any food and refreshment costs, printed materials and any other quantifiable overheads.
- If possible include the possible preparation time for the meeting (on average, it takes 4 hours for the organizers).
The summation will give you the total cost per meeting. When multiplied by number of meetings in a month/year, the numbers stack up.
Once you aim at minimizing the costs, you will find that some of the strategies to cut costs will also reduce the time wasted, as you shall see later on in this article.
3. Have an optimal number of attendees
Most employees can speak to the number of meetings they have sat in, that they really shouldn’t have been in. Meeting organizers will at time issue invites that are too broad to be actually useful in the meeting.
What this does is:
- Keep people off productive tasks to sit in meetings they are not productive in either.
- Push up the meeting costs.
- Increase the likelihood of having more distractions in the meeting.
For any meeting, it’s key to figure out the people who are utterly central to the meeting and its agenda. If your organization is big on keeping everyone in the loop, then departmental heads or a central person can share meeting minutes via email after the meeting.
Having too many people can make it harder to work together, too few people can also be unproductive.
Here is a general guide on optimal numbers from the Wall Street Journal:
- For a problem-solving meeting, have 4 to 6 people.
- For a brainstorming session, limit attendees to between 10 and 20 people.
- To set the agenda have 5 to 15 people.
- For decision making, have 4 to 7 people.
4. Clearly define the agenda and objectives
An agenda is a road map. In fact, it’s almost unfathomable how a meeting can lack a clear agenda. However, a report by Sharp Europe showed that 63% of meetings lacked an agenda. A different study by Microsoft listed lack of clear objectives as a top time waster.
On average, a clear objective can shave off 17 minutes from any meeting. To do this, have a clear agenda beforehand. Think about what is to be discussed and the outcomes you are looking for at the end of the meeting.
As with presentations, send the agenda out beforehand so that any information that has to be brought to the meeting is availed. Failing to do this will necessitate yet another meeting.
5. Set strict time limits
Here, the Parkinson ’s Law applies: work expands to fill the time available for its completion. This could not be truer for meetings. When you allow hours for a meeting or have a meeting with no end time, it will indeed drag out for as long as you can imagine. The reverse is also true.
If you estimate a meeting to take an hour, allocate slightly less time than an hour. The result is a tighter, stricter schedule.
Make it your culture to end meetings at the exact stipulated time, regardless of whether or not the agenda has been met. This communicates to everyone to be sharp and as productive as they can be during the allotted time. It also encourages prior preparation and familiarization with the agenda of the day.
It is also important to note that the longer the meeting, the less engaged and productive participants get. This means they are away from their jobs to sit in meetings they are not particularly productive at either. It’s a lose-lose situation for a firm.
6. Avoid conference call meetings
Granted, in the current business space, face to face meetings are not always feasible. This gives way to tech-aided meetings such as conference calling. As convenient as these are, they have their pitfalls as well.
In one study, 65% of employees admitted to zoning out or doing other work while on a conference call. 47% offered to have gone to the bathroom during a conference meeting!
Because the aim of a meeting is to communicate and trade ideas, having non-participatory participants only wastes time and reduces productivity. While this is a plus for face to face meetings, you can opt for real-time collaborative tools that allow for more interactive exchange.
7. Propose a no meeting day
This might sound extreme, but it’s effective. The thing about meetings is that they also delay some tasks employees have on their desks. For such an employee, a meeting means additional pressure as they have to work longer hours to catch up. This pressure can lead to frustration and burnout. When this happens, creativity and productivity are the first casualties.
It is, therefore, useful to have one or two (or more) designated no meeting days in an organization. This way, you give your employees these designated days where they expect no interruptions and they can focus on catching up on their workload.
It is not possible to avoid meetings completely because the truth is they are necessary. Therefore, focus on having the least number of meetings that can adequately support your operations. By extension, when you do have these meetings, ensure they are productive and time-bound. Remember that any excess time eaten up in meetings is taking time from your employees to be productive towards your overall goals.
