Middle managers spend up to 35 per cent of their time in meetings, while for senior managers, this goes up to 50 per cent. The way meetings are conducted reveals so much about the organisational behaviour of a company. Sadly for many companies, this behaviour borders on the toxic.
Working from home has not surprisingly made meetings more frequent, with a Harvard Business Review survey finding that in 2020 managers spent 13 per cent more time in online meetings. Years of attending and chairing meetings have helped me identify the elements that lead to unproductive meetings and wasted time. So can one get a grip on meetings to make them less tedious and frustrating?
The number-one cause of bad meetings is often poor preparation ahead of a meeting. Bulky meeting documents with information overload are frequently sent to participants too late for any meaningful analysis. PowerPoint presentations are now an integral element of most meetings. Some presenters use too many slides with excessive granular detail to show off and market themselves to their bosses. They certainly do not help participants understand the issue under discussion and take the right decisions.
But the bad manners and behaviour often experienced during meetings is the worst disrupter, especially if the chair does nothing to stop such behaviour.
A survey of 700 workers conducted in the US by business researchers SurveyMonkey found that arriving late is considered the biggest meeting “taboo” across every organisation and industry. One tactic that is invariably successful in managing late arrivals is not to let those who are more than five minutes late join the meeting. Ask them to catch up with one of the participants later.
Another disruptive behaviour so often experienced in poorly managed meetings is working during the meeting. This may usually be caused by meeting schedules too crammed with unnecessary meetings and too many participants. The use of laptops, tablets and smartphones during a meeting has made this behaviour far too familiar. A chair who knows of genuine reasons why an individual needs to concentrate on specific urgent issues should excuse them from attending the meeting and let them catch up on their work.
The bad manners and behaviour often experienced during meetings is the worst disrupter, especially if the chair does nothing to stop such behaviour
While most organisations have their gasbags who try to monopolise discussions during a meeting, not participating in a meeting is also a common failure. Every meeting has someone who is there but not really there.
There could be important reasons why they are distracted. However, if their mind is somewhere else, they probably should be. Of course, daydreaming is not always the reason behind non-participation. Some are shrewd enough to stick to the often-quoted maxim that “it is better to remain silent and risk being thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt”.
Some meeting organisers instruct participants to switch their mobile phones to silent while attending a meeting. Still, our obsession with staying in touch at all times of the day means that we have all been in a meeting recently where someone not only interrupts the meeting with a phone buzzing. The disruption gets worse when one actually answers the call in the meeting room or an adjacent space.
Equally, if not more annoying, is the ubiquitous practice of texting during a meeting. Sticklers for correct meeting behaviour often suspect that some participants are texting their friends across the table. A firm attitude by the chair should be enough to instil discipline by forbidding the use of mobile phones during meetings.
The timing of meetings is also an essential element that can help to promote productive meetings. When asked “what is your favourite day for a meeting” in a business survey, 54 per cent of participants said they preferred Tuesday or Wednesday. Almost 90 per cent felt that Monday and Friday were the worst days for a meeting. The importance of gearing up for the start of the working week and winding down at the end are valid psychological reasons behind these preferences.
A small dose of humour to lighten this subject results from another survey question. When asked the top activities that people would “rather do than attending a bad meeting”, the top replies were: going to the dentist, talking politics at a family dinner, watching cartoons in a clinic waiting room and attempting to contact a bank’s helpdesk by phone.
Meetings are here to stay. But organisations need to ask which meetings are indeed necessary. It will not surprise many if meeting schedules are indeed unnecessarily crammed.