We need to talk about meetings

You probably don’t have too many meetings. But you might have too many bad meetings.

Meetings are just ways we work together

There was a time, which I’m just about old enough to remember, when A Meeting was a relatively formal thing, booked by someone’s secretary or assistant, which we wrote in our paper diaries, with agendas typed on a typewriter (I really am old), photocopied and distributed beforehand. A dedicated note-taker would take minutes then later type them up and distribute them, on paper, by post or internal mail. People had to learn how to do all this stuff in secretarial classes (called “Office Studies” by the time I was in school), in tried-and-trusted ways which hadn’t changed much over centuries.

Fast forward to today. Technology, organisational culture and norms, and remote working have changed things a lot. We have calendars full of “meetings” very few of which are like meetings of the past, and we’re mostly left to get on with it.

But what all those calendar appointments have in common is a need (or perceived need) to set aside specific time to communicate in real-time with one or more other people.

Have a skim through your calendar and see which categories of things you participate in. In a typical week mine could include:

• 1:1s between managers and direct reports
• 1:1 catch-ups with peers and other colleagues
• formal or informal catch-ups with clients and prospective clients
• Regular team slots — these can vary widely in purpose, but sometimes they’re a convenient placeholder for whatever those people might need time together for that week
• Working sessions to make progress on a particular topic or problem
• Broadcast sessions e.g. town halls or information and training delivered mostly as a presentation
• Sessions to get consensus and make decisions among a group of people — these are probably the closest to the things we used to call “meetings”
• And if you work in a team following some kind of agile practices, you have regular activities (“ceremonies”, if you like) with a prescribed purpose, broadly similar to one of the above

These things should all be valuable. In which case why do so many people feel like time spent in meetings is time wasted?

How to waste less time in meetings

A meeting should be a good use of your time if…

• it has a worthwhile objective, that’s served well by getting two or more people together in real-time
• your presence is needed to achieve that objective
• the things that happen in the meeting serve its objective

So, to minimise the chance of wasting your time in meetings

1. find out the objective of any meeting you’re invited to, and politely decline if you don’t need to be there
2. if you think the objective can be better achieved some other way, suggest it
3. if you’re in a meeting that’s drifting off track, be a good citizen. Remind the group of the objective and gently steer them back. And thank your colleagues who do the same for you!

Complaining about being in bad meetings is like complaining about the traffic, when you are the traffic.

If you want better meetings, be an active participant in creating better meetings.