
A virtual meeting of a particular fancy type involving advanced video telepresence. Since these kinds of facilities are shared, they must be scheduled, which is constraining, of course. But it also imposes a task burden on the meeting organizers and, in some cases, on the attendees. Image courtesy Oak Ridge National Laboratory, of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science.
Meetings have a bad reputation. People complain, but they have to attend, so mostly, they do. Sometimes late, sometimes inattentively, but they do attend. One explanation for this bad reputation is that we just have too many meetings. We could do well with fewer. And one reason why we don't work harder at eliminating or shortening them might be that we don't fully appreciate how expensive they are.
To help fix that, I offer this brief survey of the true costs of meetings, end-to-end. I'm focusing on the cost components that are less-than-obvious, and possibly difficult to quantify with precision. My hope is that the case for fewer, shorter meetings can be strong enough without actual numeric estimates of costs. Let's start with the pre-meeting activities.
- Inviting people
- Someone has to decide who attends. That might involve discussions with responsible parties. These discussions can get complicated occasionally, involving people who can be very busy. Once the invitation list is set, someone has to post invitations in the calendar system, or send email invitations, or whatever. The inviting activity is usually a low-cost task, but if it's delayed by bottlenecks or negotiations about who's available when and for how long, the delay can make scheduling difficult. That's why invitation setting often has a high priority. And when that priority causes delays of other tasks, the costs can mount. Those delay costs are rarely recognized for what they are — a cost of meetings.
- Setting up the facility
- Whether the meeting is face-to-face or virtual, we need a (possibly virtual) place to hold it. Someone has to reserve it. That might require swapping with other contenders for the space, or it might require scheduling the facility so far in When the need to decide the attendance
list takes priority over other work, delaying
that work, those delay costs are rarely
recognized for what they are —
a cost of meetingsadvance that nobody else will be able to claim it. Sometimes the need to schedule in advance causes us to have regularly scheduled meetings even when the primary need we're satisfying is keeping a claim on the facility, rather than the business we transact. That tactic adds to the burden of too many meetings. It's an example of addressing the right problem with the wrong tool, which is rarely a smart way to go. Find another way to lay claim to the facility. - Getting to and from the meeting
- People who attend in person in a place other than where they work must transport themselves to and fro. Even if the meeting is virtual, attendees at various sites might have to meet in conference rooms for the videoconference or teleconference. People who must travel to attend have an even greater time cost. And people who attend virtual meetings without leaving their own offices might have to set up their connections, log in, and possibly even install software. All of this adds to costs, and it's significant because it affects every attendee.
We'll continue next time with more underappreciated cost generators. Next in this series Top
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
On Facilitation Suggestions from Meeting Participants
- Team leaders often facilitate their own meetings, and although there are problems associated with that
dual role, it's so familiar that it works well enough, most of the time. Less widely understood are
the problems that arise when other meeting participants make facilitation suggestions.
The End-to-End Cost of Meetings: III
- Many complain about attending meetings. Certainly meetings can be maddening affairs, and they also cost
way more than most of us appreciate. Understanding how much we spend on meetings might help us get control
of them. Here's Part III of a survey of some less-appreciated costs.
Allocating Airtime: I
- The problem of people who dominate meetings is so serious that we've even devised processes intended
to more fairly allocate speaking time. What's happening here?
Naming Ideas
- Participants in group discussions sometimes reference each other's contributions using the contributor's
name. This risks offending the contributor or others who believe the idea is theirs. Naming ideas is
less risky.
Formulaic Utterances: I
- With all due respect is an example of a category of linguistic forms known as formulaic
utterances. They differ across languages and cultures, but I speculate that their functions are
near universal. In the workplace, using them can be constructive — or not.
See also Effective Meetings and Workplace Politics for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
Coming June 1: Mental Accounting and Technical Debt
- In many organizations, technical debt has resisted efforts to control it. We've made important technical advances, but full control might require applying some results of the behavioral economics community, including a concept they call mental accounting. Available here and by RSS on June 1.
And on June 8: Flexible Queue Management
- In meetings of 5-30 participants, managing the queue of contributors can be challenging. A strict first-in-first-out order can cause confusion and waste of time if important contributions are delayed. Some meetings need more flexible queue management. Available here and by RSS on June 8.
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