SEE: Time management tips: How to create meetings that work (ZDNet) Nevertheless, this doesn’t change the fact that meeting participants begin to lose focus and mental acuity after 60 or 90 minutes of intense concentration. According to Russell’s research review, 64% of meetings last more than an hour, with 39% of all meetings exceeding 90 minutes.Ī simple approach for avoiding meeting fatigue would be to abolish all meetings over 30 minutes or even 60 minutes–but it can’t be done.įor example, if your design team is meeting to architect a suite of applications and how these apps will interact with each other, or if your database or network team is meeting to re-architect IT infrastructure, the need to focus on and discuss the details of these projects cannot wrap up in 30 or 60 minutes. It seems that many companies already inherently recognize this. Second, it’s important to acknowledge that there is such as thing as meeting fatigue. This lets presenters know they should come prepared. The meeting agenda should also list anyone who’s presenting facts or recommendations in the meeting. Distribute an agenda several days in advance, and specifically list what you expect the meeting to accomplish. The first, and possibly most important step is to ensure beforehand that all meetings are planned and purposeful, so that participants leave with a feeling of accomplishment and purpose. So what can managers do to make sure meetings run more smoothly and accomplish desired goals? They bought into taking meeting “offline” times to resolve issues, and coming back to the next steering committee meeting with succinct summaries. This meeting strategy worked rather well, because the culture of the company was such that every senior and middle manager in those meetings was personally interested in getting back out on the floor to solve the issues and the fires they were fighting that day. If we got into a complicated thicket of discussion during the meeting, the discussion was tabled and advised to continue offline–with a resolution being presented to our steering committee group at the next meeting. They were difficult to discuss comprehensively in a 30-minute timeframe, but the company stuck to its meeting start and end times, using the clock like an egg timer. Central to these discussions were conversations about IT infrastructure and what needed to be re-architected, goals of the company and its stakeholders, and of course, regulatory issues and the overall regulatory climate.Īll of these are meaty issues in themselves. The meetings that I was asked to attend concerned strategic planning for a smart energy grid. Some companies have tried to do something about it by instituting the idea of “the 30-minute meeting.” I saw this in action a couple of years ago, when I was consulting with a major West Coast utilities company. This meeting discontent has been known by organizations for years. That’s a lot for something many employees consider unproductive. Russell also concluded that the average meeting costs an organization $338 in paid staff salary time. Other complaints were that meetings were disorganized or dominated by individuals. The most common complaint about meetings was that they don’t result in any decisions getting made. After examining studies done on the topic, Russell found that, by far, staff meetings were the most common meeting type, followed by task force meetings, and information sharing meetings. In 2016, Daniel Russell, a former marketing consultant who created Attentiv, a time and meeting management platform, blogged about the toll that meetings took on organizations. Here's how to get more out of meetings in less time. Long meetings, and too many meetings, can be a source of employee dissatisfaction. The 30-minute meeting: Why shorter meetings can be more productive
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