An epidemic of cooperation

Author: Kevan Hall

The average FSTE 100 Company employs 2,300 people full time to do nothing else but sit in unnecessary meetings. These meetings are just part of an epidemic of cooperation that is making large companies slow and expensive to run.

A survey of managers in large companies by SpeedLeading,com found that they spend 36% of their time in meetings and felt they only needed to be there for 45% of the time. If managers are spending 20% of their time in unnecessary meetings then each one of them spends an average of 9 weeks per year in unnecessary meetings, in total an astonishing 9 years of their working lives.

You can take the Speed Report yourself at the website and see how you compare with other companies in our database.

In simple, single location companies, meetings are often unnecessary and badly run but at least they are inexpensive and soon over. In today’s complex companies a meeting can involve flying people from around the world. Meetings become expensive and difficult to run with multi-cultural participants and limited face to face time available. All this means that we have to be much more selective about how we use our face to face meeting time. We cannot afford the traditional pattern of 50% of meetings being irrelevant.

“People always complain about meetings, but still they turn up,” says Kevan Hall, author of Speed Lead – Faster, simpler ways to manage people, projects and teams in complex companies”.

“Many people tell me - “our meeting is rubbish, but it is worth going because you can get some really useful things done in the breaks and after the meeting.” If what we do in the breaks is so useful – why don’t we do this in the meeting and leave out the pointless PowerPoint presentations?”

I think that the networking and problem solving nature of the discussions in the breaks is the real value of the face to face meeting and the passive consumption of presentations and information is largely a waste of time.

“I visited a conference in the USA this spring where 200 managers flew to New York from Europe, Asia and throughout the USA to sit through 8 hours of presentations per day. It cost the company $900,000 for travel and accommodation, and about 1,000 days of people away from their jobs. The only real value I saw from the meeting was the networking in the evening and this could have been achieved in a fraction of the time.”

Companies invest heavily in presentation technology, meetings training and facilitation but the most important skill, says Hall, lies in knowing what to leave out. If you want to stop wasting time in unnecessary meetings, start with these 3 simple Speed Tips

1. Eliminate individual topics from meetings – most meetings waste a lot of time on activity reviews and other tasks which are only of interest to one or two individuals in the meeting.

2. Have items where everyone is involved on the agenda first and then let people who are not required for the later items leave as soon as possible.

3. Insist on interaction – if it does not require participation it does not need a face to face meeting – you can send facts and presentations by email.

“This is a real win-win” says Hall, “you can just cut out unnecessary content, make your meetings faster and improve job satisfaction by following these tips. This could save you a day per week of unnecessary meetings - for the rest of your career, and it needs no special investment.”

You can see how your unnecessary meetings burden compares with other companies and find out more about what to do about it at SpeedLeading,com

Last updated: 19/10/06 01:44pm