Too many bad meetings? – free survey and report

During the pandemic many of our clients and participants experienced a sharp increase in the number of meetings and found that the meetings often started earlier and finished later. As we settle down to either a fully remote or hybrid pattern of working, it is time to reset our meetings culture to reflect our new ways of working.

We have developed a free diagnostic tool that you can send to as many people as you like in your organisation to collect data on the cost of meetings and the specific areas where they might be improved in your team or wider organization. You will receive a free report on the findings with no obligation to do anything more.

Even before COVID, meetings were a problem. People told us they spent an average of two days a week in meetings and that 50% of the content was irrelevant. We wrote our book Kill Bad Meetings and developed training programs to help halve the number, and improve the quality of face-to-face and virtual meetings.

As we establish remote or hybrid working as our norm for the long term, the number of meetings has increased and relevance has not improved. Many people still don’t have the skills to create real interaction and engagement on virtual meetings, and multitasking (a word we use to make not paying attention sound like a skill) has increased.

Almost nobody has been trained in the skills of making hybrid meetings effective, with the virtual participants usually finding it hard to participate.

Meetings are where collaboration happens. If your meetings culture is poor, then your collaboration is poor.

We think there is no better opportunity to cut out unnecessary work and improve engagement than by cutting out unnecessary meetings and improving the quality of the ones that remain. This can genuinely save you a day a week of unnecessary work.

Although everybody we meet agrees that meetings are often a waste of time, it can be hard to build a campaign to do this systematically across the organisation because the time and cost is often hidden amongst lots of individual budgets and diaries.

There also seems to be an acceptance of poor quality in meetings that we wouldn’t tolerate in any other area of our business. Would you be happy if your products, services or internal processes only worked properly half of the time? So why do we accept this in our meetings, it does not have to be this way.

A great place to start in any improvement activity is building a proper business case.

We developed this survey to help you to quantify the cost of meetings, including the unnecessary ones, and to identify specifically the areas that need to be improved. The report includes a meeting score on several elements; how well your meetings are planned in advance, the processes you follow, the quality of participation and engagement, decision-making, and follow up.

If you follow the link here you can quickly set up a dedicated (and private) survey for your own team or organisation which you can then send to as many people as you like. You will receive an automated report on the findings.

You can then choose to do something about it yourself, or you might want to talk to us about our effective meetings training.

Everyone says they are too busy today, how about giving them back a day a week whilst improving your collaboration?