Meetings, a Waste of Time

Enter any office and see the blank faces of employees. They have just had a meeting. Ask anyone if the meeting has been useful – they will shake their hands. Meetings have become a sort of office culture. Your time will be divvied up between meetings and actual work.

For the employees who couldn’t care less, meetings are a fantastic way to bunk off and work less on their work stations. Yet, for those conscientious individuals who know what needs to be done to move forward, the issue is quite serious.

After all, if you have just spent two hours in a meeting, you might actually want to get down to work. But you are already miffed and you have been distracted enough. Your dynamic is messed with and you won’t be able to pull quite as much work as you do.

Believe it or not, there are people who come on Monday and can pull off as much workload – without doing any overtime – as some employees are just better left to their own devices. These employees will be a huge boon to any company, but you don’t want to mess with their time and how they arrange their time to complete tasks.

You just keep giving them tasks.

Managers and Executives Agree – Meetings Suck!

According to data published in Harvard Business Reviews, meetings just suck. And they suck big time. Out of 182 senior managers, the overwhelming majority agreed that meetings are just a waste of time and an excuse for less productive employees to do their job. Worst, meetings often prevented people from doing their own job. And once we are talking senior managers, you know for a fact that these are people who wouldn’t actually bother with skiving work. Here’s what the HBR study showed:

“We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.”

The results are pretty convincing. Then again, even mid-level managers are perfectly aware that if they have a lot of work to do would find it difficult to accomplish everything they want to if a meeting is rearing its ugly head. There’s more.

Meetings Teach Conformism and That’s Not Good

Yet, while many employees will try to fight meetings at first, they eventually give up and become conformists. Why, because it’s easier. You can just walk into a meeting, finish your shift and then be happily on your way. Why give the company more than the managers ask for, right?

Yet, this will soon lead to one thing that might – perish the thought – prompt more meetings. ‘Our productivity is falling steadily,’ a serious-looking manager would say. And no, it’s not going to be because of the summer humdrumness or the holiday festivities. If anything, people are far more motivated to work hard during the Christmas festivities rather than anything else.

No, it’s the bloody meetings! When you are owning a company, you don’t want your employees to be stuck in meaningless meetings. Imagine that this was a plumbing company.

Instead of asking your employees to stay in meetings 1/3 of the job, you would expect them to be out there helping people. When a consumer books a service from https://www.prosco.com/businesses/plumbers, they expect a prompt response and assistance with one of their plumbing issues around the home – which involves a leaking pipe or a clogged sewage system.

This may seem like a crude example, but it paints the picture perfectly, as it’s intended to compare with the practicality of the matter over-inflating the workload by holding uncalled for meet-ups.

Not least of all, meetings can be stressful. Why feed your employees data every day when it doesn’t change anything in the short term? It’s better to have meetings every few weeks and make sure these meetings are no longer than 1.5 hours. This way, employees will be eager to ask questions.

Presenting impactful information efficiently is going to become an art form, and companies will certainly want to make sure they are dragging their feet on that one. Yet, meetings must be brought to a minimum!