What really happens on conference calls?

Many face-to-face meetings are boring or badly run. Unfortunately, when we are face-to-face politeness, status and peer group pressure mean that we have to at least look interested.

On conference calls we don’t face these pressures and our real feelings about the meeting are harder to gauge.

Research shows that in the typical conference call:

• only 23% are paying full attention,
• 27% are multitasking (i.e. not paying attention),
• 30% are daydreaming  ,
• and (my personal favorite) 8% are not fully dressed.

This is fairly consistent with our findings on unnecessary meetings content, where people tell us that approximately half of the content of their meetings and conference calls is not really relevant.

This is a level of waste we wouldn’t accept in any other parts of our business.

And of course it may be that the participants are right: the other tasks they are thinking or  daydreaming about may well be more relevant and interesting than the meeting topics.

At Global Integration we’ve worked with thousands of people who work for large organizations and we’ve developed a lot of useful materials to help cut down the number and improve the quality of meetings.

In 2014, partly to celebrate our 20th birthday, and partly because we’re so annoyed with the poor quality of meetings that the people we meet have inflicted on them, we’re launching a free  “Better Meetings Campaign”.

We are also running a Better Meetings survey. You can take it here https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BetterMeetingsSurvey and find out how you compare with other organizations.

Why not sign up to  join the campaign for better meetings here: https://www.global-integration.com/meetings/signup/ You will receive a series of six, free, weekly booklets that contain tips, ideas and actions to enable you to run fewer, better face to face and virtual meetings. Step one shows you how to say no to unnecessary meetings.