Meetings are a pain in the neck for everybody with a neck. And they cost money too, which annoys shareholders. Clearly, we need to eliminate meetings, or at least reduce them to the point where they only bother shareholders.
I've conducted extensive research to solve the problem of meetings. Although I collected tons of survey data, I must admit that like many corporate surveys, I never actually analyzed the data, because I knew exactly what conclusions I wanted to reach, after thinking deeply for several minutes. Actually, I never even conducted the survey, because it seemed like such a waste since I had already decided not to analyze the data.
So here are six sure-fire ways to eliminate meetings, according to the survey I would have conducted, if I had actually done the survey and then actually analyzed the data.
- Get rid of half your conference rooms
- Conference rooms are without a doubt the leading cause of meetings. According to my calculations, removing 50% of the conference rooms will reduce meetings by approximately 50%.
- Forbid meetings on even-numbered dates
- Since getting rid of half the conference rooms eliminates half the meetings, we can painlessly eliminate the half of the meetings that would normally be scheduled on even-numbered dates. Um, wait. That won't work. Never mind.
- Eliminate any meeting whose main agenda item contains the words "review," "strategy," or "status"
- This includes items like Contract Review, Strategy Review, Project Status, and the dreaded Contract Strategy Project Status Review. These are usually the most painful drug-out affairs, and getting rid of them produces substantial economies that go straight to the bottom line, strategy-wise.
- Meetings are a
pain in the neck
for everybody
with a neck - Ban anyone with the title "director" (or above) from "sitting in"
- Banning these people not only saves them time, but also saves time for the people whose meetings into which they're sitting on, because as everybody knows, high-level sitters-in are the main cause of PowerPoint.
- Make four-wheel drive illegal
- A key element of meetings is the attendees. Making four-wheel drive illegal will keep many of them from attending in bad winter weather. In places where snow is rare, I advocate making automobile air conditioning illegal, just to be fair.
- Change daylight savings time
- Have daylight savings time only in months that contain either M, J but not R, or E but not T. Meeting attendance would fall rapidly, because studies I haven't done indicate that less than 30% of us could figure out which months, if any, would have daylight savings time. And no software company I know of could implement this algorithm without crashing Windows.
I have one final idea for the meetings we can't eliminate. They would be much shorter if we could all agree to agree with each other more often. So get everyone else to agree with you. Or maybe you can just agree with them. Whatever. Top Next Issue
Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
- Social Distancing for Pandemic Flu
- It's time we all began to take seriously the warning about a possible influenza pandemic. Whether or
not your organization has a plan, you can do much to reduce your own chances of infection, and the chances
of mass infection, by adopting a set of practices known as social distancing.
- Remote Facilitation in Synchronous Contexts: II
- Facilitators of synchronous distributed meetings — meetings that occur in real time, via telephone
or video — encounter problems that facilitators of face-to-face meetings do not. Here's Part II
of a little catalog of those problems, and some suggestions for addressing them.
- Contributions, Open and Closed
- We can classify contributions to discussions according to the likelihood that they stimulate new thought.
The more open they are, the more they stimulate new thought. How can we encourage open contributions?
- Effects of Shared Information Bias: I
- Shared information bias is the tendency for group discussions to emphasize what everyone already knows.
It's widely believed to lead to bad decisions. But it can do much more damage than that.
- Virtual Meetings: Then and Now
- Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to stay-at-home orders that affect many of us, more of our meetings
are virtual, and the virtual meetings we used to conduct are somewhat changed. How have they changed,
and what can we do about it?
See also Effective Meetings and Effective Communication at Work for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming April 3: Recapping Factioned Meetings
- A factioned meeting is one in which participants identify more closely with their factions, rather than with the meeting as a whole. Agreements reached in such meetings are at risk of instability as participants maneuver for advantage after the meeting. Available here and by RSS on April 3.
- And on April 10: Managing Dunning-Kruger Risk
- A cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect can create risk for organizational missions that require expertise beyond the range of knowledge and experience of decision-makers. They might misjudge the organization's capacity to execute the mission successfully. They might even be unaware of the risk of so misjudging. Available here and by RSS on April 10.
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