A manager once observed to some of us that many people’s goal is to be the second-to-last person to arrive at a meeting. Being the last makes you the person who is holding everybody else up, while arriving sooner means wasting time waiting for the latecomers. It would seem that meetings aren’t actually a favorite activity for most people. One problem is that for many people, meetings are an interruption which keeps them from their work. But if that is so, why do we have so many meetings?
Understanding the Problem
I once took a course on Dynamic Facilitation, an approach for making meetings more productive. The instructor, Jim Rough, suggested that the only legitimate purpose for a meeting was to make a decision, and the only people who should be there are those needed to make that decision. Now that may sound a bit extreme, but it does highlight what seems to be at the core of people’s problems with meetings: many attendees feel that for at least part of the meeting, that their presence has no value, and they are just wasting their time. Given that the cost to a business of a meeting is the sum of the costs of all of the attendees, that does seem foolish – the business is spending a great deal of money to do little but annoy a number of their workers and keep them from being productive. Why would anyone choose to do that?
Obviously, that is not the intent. It is instructive, though, to think about the kinds of things that meeting attendees often find frustrating, and see what can be done to make things better.
1. Interminable Meetings
Attendees at a meeting where they feel they are wasting their time often have a single desire: that the meeting end as soon as possible, or at least at a predictable time. Many meetings, though, only seem to end when the meeting organizer or a critical attendee has another meeting to attend. Even when meetings are nominally scheduled to end at a specific time, it is not uncommon for them to go on and on, as long as some discussion is continuing. Attendees start checking their phones, looking at their laptops, and so on. They are mentally absent, but physically present and unable to complete their assigned tasks.
A related problem is sheer meeting length. Most people have a need to get up and walk around from time to time, or possibly go to the bathroom. Meetings that go over an hour-and-a-half without a break can be physically uncomfortable, and it can feel very awkward simply to walk out for a short time.
2. Detailed Problem Discussions
In my career, I have only worked at one company that had a one-to-one correspondence between projects and first-level manager teams. At others, we had either organizations which were responsible for multiple small projects, or large projects split across multiple teams. In many of those, each team had a number of areas within the large system. In most of these cases, then, any first-level manager’s organization is likely to have people working on different things. While a number of coding problems arise from this, including code ownership and code silos, it also leads to some serious problems with meetings. It can easily happen that those team members interested in a specific issue will drill down on a particular problem, while the rest of the team let their attention wander. If the meeting organizer is not participating in the discussion, he will often let it go for a short time and then suggest that the participants meet up afterwards to continue. If he is participating in the discussion, however, it can go on until the other attendees get bored and wish to leave, or the organizer realizes that he is running out of time for the meeting.
3. Boring Presentations
Presentations really do seem like an appropriate use of meeting time, but there are problems. As above, not everyone is interested in every subject. For short presentations, this is usually not an issue, but long ones are likely to have the same kinds of issues as detailed discussions: people start to get bored.
A larger problem is that doing presentations is a skill, something akin to public speaking. There are those who can make a not-very-interesting subject fascinating, and others who can make an interesting subject mind-numbing. Sadly, the latter is much more common than the former.
4. Status Meetings
This is a common form of meeting, where each member of the team reports on his or her status to the manager, who may comment and thank the team member. It is clearly demonstrated that the reports are specifically to the manager, and are often not all that interesting to other team members. When those reports are quick, the status meeting can be relatively painless; however, sometimes others participants are interested, and a detail discussion results, thus annoying any attendees who aren’t involved in the work in question.
What Can Be Done?
Obviously, those who run meetings don’t want to waste people’s time. A lot of this happens just because meetings are the common solution in many business organizations. But there are ways to make things better:
- Not everything needs to be a meeting. Some managers, for example, ask for weekly status emails. When I worked as a project manager, I simply walked around to each member of my time to ask for the status information I needed.
- Any meeting should have some guarantees to the attendees of its time limits, and the meeting organizer should strongly enforce them.
- Attendance at a meeting should almost always be on the basis of interest, not organization. Requiring somebody’s attendance without interest is likely to lead to them being physically present, but mentally absent.
- Presentation skills should be taught, and not assumed simply to arise from a need to communicate, or ownership of a presentation application.
- The use of a trained facilitator for meetings that need to reach a decision should be strongly considered. Again, such skills need to be taught.
Meetings have a long history. That doesn’t mean that they are a good solution to most problems. Organizations must recognize that over-scheduling of meetings is a massive waste of time and resources, and affects employee morale.
One problem I used to have with meetings at a previous place of employment was that the manager did not know how to organize their agenda. Suppose, for example, that there were twenty items on the agenda, and 18 of them were relatively easy to decide, no real debate needed issues. Some were even just quick announcements that they wanted to make in person.
The manager would start the meeting with the two items on the agenda that would take the most time, and would probably not be decided at this meeting anyway, and that everyone wanted to have their say on, and argue at length. The result inevitably was that the entire alloted time for the meeting would pass while we talked, sometimes just about the first of these two things, and they we would have to ‘stay over’ to accomplish the other 18 things 🙁 A simple adjustment in the order of items would have meant we would have accomplished everything we were actually going to accomplish and have left on time.