Most meetings are a complete waste of time

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Gary Chow | No Comments » | Trackback URL

Meetings? I loathe them. The corporate types I mean, not meetings with friends or with clients, those kinds are generally useful and rewarding.

Most meetings held in large corporations are a complete waste of time, typically arranged by a nabob who loves the idea of meetings to ‘touch base’, to provide a ‘heads-up’, to talk over ‘deliverables’, to address issues ‘around the space’ or perhaps to gain a forum to spout the latest management buzzwords. At these types of meetings, the only thing ever resolved is when to have the follow-up meeting.

I was reminded of what a waste of time meetings are in a recent assignment for a large organisation. The purpose of this large organisation is to deliver vital services to the community, but from what I could gather it seemed to be all about meetings. I found myself constantly in meetings: project meetings, committee meetings, sub-committee meetings, staff meetings, one-on-one sessions, and workshops for this, that and the other. If they weren’t bad enough, there were also assorted ‘love-ins’, informal gatherings such as morning and afternoon teas, the real purpose of which escaped me.

Typically, the person who asked for the meeting spent most of it droning on about ‘deliverables’ and ‘governance’ and ‘risk registers’ and so on, much of which had little to do with solving issues in the actual project at hand. It was as if the person simply fell in love with the sound of his/her voice like Narcissus fell in love with his reflection in the pond. Strangely, when someone asked a question that actually did have something to do with the project, he would be asked to take the matter ‘off line’, which prompted yet another meeting. Most meetings would go for at least an hour but many could easily have been wrapped up in about 20 minutes. What annoyed me was that little was ever resolved and usually no decisions were made (other than to have more meetings).

When you add up all the time wasted at meetings, just how much actual work is done in a large corporation? And it’s not just the time wasted in the meetings but also time spent in preparing for the meeting and time spent doing the unnecessary tasks that came out of the meeting and in updating the numerous spreadsheets that were designed to track the meetings.

The prevalence of daily/hourly meetings is one of the reasons why customer service has declined over the years and why things take so long to accomplish. People in large companies are spending far too much of their time in meetings when that time could be better invested in just doing their jobs. But if meetings are your ‘thing’ then why not run them better? Here are a few tips on running productive meetings.