Friday, February 26, 2010
9 Tips for Efficient Meetings
Productivity501: "Meetings can be one of the biggest time drains for you as an individual and for a business. A meeting with 7 people all making $20 per hour costs a business $140 per hour. If it is a once-per-week meeting and there are 15 minutes wasted at each meeting, the total yearly waste comes to over $1,800. I don’t know about you, but a one hour meeting with only 15 minutes wasted is actually a pretty good meeting, in my experience. Half of a meeting being wasted is more par for the course, and entire meetings that are unproductive is fairly common."
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11 comments:
One of the ways that I find time is wasted often in meetings, is when communication breaks down. More often than not too many people are talking. I find that it is extremely important to stress, and indicate to everyone involved who is speaking. It's important to not allow people to speak over each other. Letting one another argue is healthy, but it will only be productive if the group can hear one another speak.
These are all great tips for an efficient meeting. Many times meetings don't have a clear point or are too short for it really to be helpful. This article points out that using email instead of a meeting is a valid form of communication and should be used along with the importance of having an agenda and sticking to it, predominately meaning begin and end on time. Having the right people present, allowing for argument, and recording any and all decisions are all great points as well.
This article makes several good points and clearly defines meeting tips that most would agree are good ones, but don't always follow. The article combats this well by breaking down exactly why these tips are important to having an efficient meeting. I find it somewhat sad, although it is true, that certain people have to be tip-toed around because their feelings will get hurt if you don't invite them to the meeting, especially when it gets to the point that you would schedule it to conflict with a pre-existing meeting of theirs. It seems somewhat childish, although the article spent a good deal of time on it.
This article reminds me a lot of my entrepreneurship class in the sense that there's an underlying message of time is money, or time is of the essence so when you're getting a group of people together to discuss something that actually requires their physical presence, it better be worth it. I completely agree. Furthermore, meetings should always be strategically placed in the day, to not only a time when everyone can meet but neither late at night or too early in the day because you want every member in the meeting to be at their most productive state. It's also should always be assumed that any and all work that can be done before the meeting should be done well ahead of time.
There are three points that the article makes that I find very interesting. The first is "meetings are for arguing". The article makes a good point that if you are just making statements, the same information could be distributed with an email or memo sent out to the participants. One should save meetings for topics that have solutions to find or details to iron out. The second point, and one that I often forget, is always have an agenda. Just in my short experience running meetings. When you have a published agenda (not one in your head, but one everyone attending knows about), the meetings tend to stay on track longer and are more efficient in the long run. Lastly, the point made about stopping by the offices of people who are often late right before the meeting is a good one. Maybe you can convince them to walk to the meeting with you or just some friendly nagging will encourage them to come.
Generally, this list makes sense and I would agree with all of its points. Oddly enough, I agree most that meetings are the place to argue. If a meeting were just about disseminating information to a large group or team, email would work almost as well, and would be a much more efficient use of time. I often think that someone of the meetings I've been to would have better been had via-email or Skype. I also am a firm believer of the notion that things brought up in a meeting should be handled then, if time allows -- use all of the time that you have available. Often I hear "yes, but we should discuss that later" when there are still 15 minutes left in the meeting. If efficiency is the concern, getting everyone back in the room again is going to be the least efficient thing, than having some people not care about that particular side conversation.
There's a saying in the business world that my dad is fond of: "Meetings: the practical alternative to work." I find it kind of amusing that people who hold lots of meetings need to be given tips that seem so basic, such as "have an agenda" and "invite the right people." The tip I find most useful is that meetings are for presenting opposing points of view, not just stating information that cannot be argued. I think that keeping this tip in mind would definitely cut down on the amount of unnecessary meetings in the world.
I think that it's really important to make sure that meetings need to have actual important information in them, rater than just facts. Especially in the theatre business, none of us have time for pointless meetings, and every minute is important to us. I also agree that it is very important to record any decisions. For example, during a production meeting, even though everyone might be taking their own notes, I think it's important for the production manager to take notes for everyone, because it's easy for people to forget to write down important notes and decisions. This also helps to keep everyone on the same page. I really like the idea of having a document that everyone can edit, because I think this would help make everyone feel like their ideas are important.
I believe that the most overlooked and most important element of this list is the fact that meeting should be for arguing. It is too often that meetings occur to disperse information that could just as easily (and probably more efficiently and effectively) be distributed via e-mail or memo (which is probably also in email form now-a-days). A meeting is a significant drain of time (commute time, focus time, formalities time, etc.) and in today’s world, it is probably more useful to have in formation in written form than delivered orally. However, if a meeting is necessitated, the other facts play a crucial role. If you do not have the right people on time discussing the topics that are meant to be discussed, the meeting is simply a waste of time.
This article does have a lot of great information about meetings. I agree with the tips and am surprised how some of them are more of a sneaky strategy of how things can happen before or outside of the meeting based on personalities. The tip about arguing ideas is important but most people do not know how to do this effectively and in the professional way. It is something I know that I am working on and probably most people my age are as well. I do agree with Allegra, I don't like pointless meetings so it is always good to have an agenda and that was one of the best tips. I also think that if there seems to be a lack of agenda at meetings over and over, that is when people start not to care and then come late.
In general, I think these posts are really useful but difficult to implement. Especially in our production meetings it's hard to wrangle people into staying on the agenda and keeping all the information relevant to everyone in the room. A lot of times there's information that people need to hear about but not respond to so it's hard to really sort that information.
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