Meetings are the quickest way to waste lots of money

I have never met a team who think that meetings are a good use of their time.
Whether it’s a daily “stand up”; a weekly “get together”; a monthly “team report”; or a quarterly “off-site”, meetings can be a horrible waste of time.  How often do you hear someone close a meeting with the phrase “let’s get back to work”?  Surely the meeting was work!

A team meeting should be used for making decisions and agreeing priorities, based on the current performance against the plan.  And that means everyone needs to know the plan.  And everyone needs to know their performance against it. 

A meeting is not a forum to discuss how to get work done.  Or even what work should be done. 

Whenever I go to a meeting, I like to have in mind the cost of that meeting.  It’s a simple calculation.  Multiply the hourly rate of the participants by the number of hours the meeting takes.  That figure represents a cost to the business.  And the meeting generates zero revenue – no-one has made anything or sold anything while the meeting has taken place.

Cost: high. Productivity: zero.

Yet some businesses insist on having meetings for their own sake, invite many people to participate, make the meetings regular (whether they’re needed or not) and end them, yet again, with that phrase: “let’s get back to work”!
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So, at Efficient to Effective, we like to demonstrate the most productive, least resource-hungry methods of achieving what meetings are for: measuring performance and improving results.  Contact us, so we can show you how.