Are You Measuring Meetings or Wasting Money?
N.G. Noah / October 7, 2020
What exactly is it that makes a meeting a productivity-killer? How do online meetings change things in a post-pandemic world? What does research say?
Let’s have a look.
Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
C. N. Parkinson
So goes Parkinson’s Law, coined in 1955. This is the act of spreading a ten-minute work to a few hours or sometimes an entire day of misery and anxiety. Probably (we hope) involuntarily.
Now, just think about the last time you had a 23-minute meeting. Or 42. No memories? Join the club.
But why bother with arbitrary times and lengths? Why complicate life? One hour is a good, round amount of time, right? And if we schedule a meeting on the hour people will sure enough be on time! (they won’t)
Besides, only trains run at arbitrary hours!
Default Options: Curse or a Blessing?
First of all, it is true that most workplace meetings are one hour long. One of the culprits in this trend is your calendar software, which usually defaults to a length of one hour starting on the hour.
Research (this, this, this, this and this) has clearly shown that people overwhelmingly go with the default option rather than go through the agonizing process of decision making.
While it might be a blessing to be presented with a well-thought-out, cognitive-load-easing default option that leaves little room for improvement, the one-hour default doesn’t seem to fit the bill. It’s easy on the eyes and sounds good to the ears but comes with its own set of issues. Pretty much like Lindsay Lohan.
To be fair, there are ways to change the default length of events in most calendar software, but Newton’s first law applies here as well. Until an external force (upper management) compels to change things, remain as you were.
Meetings, Objectives and Time
Since meetings presumably have specific objectives with a varying number of attendees, naturally the time required to reach those objectives won’t always be the same.
While trying to overoptimize meeting lengths to the second would be futile, a laissez-faire approach isn’t going to fix things either.
How to Make the Workday More Productive?
According to a 2020 Workfront survey employees spend in average only 43% of their day on primary job duties. So, what’s getting in the way? Respondents from Europe and the US say attending wasteful meetings is the number one time waster with excessive emails a close second.
Around 10% of the work week is reportedly spent on wasteful meetings. Research by Prof. Rogelberg, author of “The Surprising Science of Meetings”, a study by Bain & Company published in Harvard Business Review and a 2019 Korn Ferry survey report similar results varying between 5-10%.
A poor meeting culture at workplace results in a major hit to productivity. 67% of knowledge workers say that spending too much time in meetings distracts them from doing their job properly. While meetings are an indispensable part of work life for keeping relevant people up-to-date with relevant information and enjoying your favorite finger food, the data shows that we can cut down on meeting times while getting more out of them by fixing a few things.
One Distraction Leads to Another
Inefficient meetings are not isolated events. They bring down our overall work performance with spillover effects. Unnecessary meetings create a distraction which leads to loss of context which in turn delays getting back to the disrupted task.
Research shows that one distraction usually leads to more, amplifying the effects of a single disruption. The result is that you’ll simply be getting less work done.
And then there is the financial cost to the company.
Cost of Wasteful Meetings $$$
Some people raise an eyebrow to such calculations, probably for fear of losing out on the delicious finger food. While that’s a valid concern, let’s still do a quick back of the envelope calculation to see what we’re dealing with.
And relax, the cost of snacks won’t be factored in. Not on my watch.
The average annual salary in the US and Germany is slightly above $50k whereas in the UK and France it’s just under $50k.
So let’s take $50k for our example.
A company with a 1,000 employees pays $50 million in salaries. (excluding benefits and other costs to the employer depending on the country).
Let’s take the lower end of estimates and say 5% of employees’ time is wasted on unproductive meetings.
That’s $2.5 million a year down the drain just for wasted salaries alone.
No matter how much we downplay it, we’re talking about a seven figure dollar amount per 1,000 employees which is neither budgeted nor accounted for. Amazingly, in a world where we’re obsessed with measuring everything, meetings have skillfully managed to stay under the radar.
Measure, Analyze, Improve.
Every organization may have different sticking points and the only way to find out what those are at your company is knowing what to measure and then… to measure.
Measuring meetings just got easier since most meetings moved online now. During the earlier days of the pandemic in March 2020, Microsoft Teams alone hosted 45 million hours of meetings in one day.
In the next articles we’ll be looking into the issues that plague meetings, and how to measure and analyze them. When you’ve done all that, then you’re good to have the one meeting to rule them all, one meeting to find the stakeholders, bring them all together and build a better meeting culture that benefits both employees individually and the company at large.