Why meetings must change

- Meetings steal time at work. If you want to make an improvement, it's good to start with a measure. This helps make the size of the challenge visible and it gives you a baseline for measuring your improvement. Start by looking at your diary over the last few weeks. Concentrate on meetings with more than two people. One-to-one meetings usually aren't such a problem. Work out what percentage of a typical week you spend in these meetings, either face-to-face, or through technologies such as audio conference or online meetings. On average, our participants tell us the direct time they spend sitting in meetings is about two days per week or 40% of their time. Now think about the time you spend preparing for meetings. You might be putting together a presentation, doing pre-reading, lobbying, or traveling. This varies widely, depending on your job. Will probably add a few hours on top of your direct time in meetings. Next, work out for the meetings you attend what percent of the time you spend in these meetings, is the content relevant, and you really need to be there to do your job. Now, this will only be a rough estimate, and maybe something you want to make a note of for the next few weeks in the meetings you do attend. The average for thousands of our past participants is around 50%. Taking these figures together, you should be able to work out what percentage of your time you spend in unnecessary meetings. For many people, this represents a day a week, or 20% of their time. You can easily turn this into a monetary figure if you prefer. From an organizational point of view, this means that 1/5 of our most expensive managers and professional people are constantly tied up in unnecessary meetings. from a personal point of view, it means if you don't make a change, you'll probably spend eight years of your professional life in unnecessary meetings. Is there any other area of your business where 20% waste would be acceptable? Would 20% product failure or 20% scrap be okay? Yet, somehow this is the norm for meetings in many organizations. Starting with a measure like this will help create the dissatisfaction you and your colleagues need to make a change and give you a baseline to measure improvements.