On a busy project it’s common to have a full calendar of meeting; so much so, that it’s often hard to find time to get actual work done!
When something new crops up, people are quick to add another meeting to the calendar, but how often do people go out of their way to remove meetings?
Once a recurring meeting gets established it can be really hard to get rid of it, even if it’s not achieving its purpose. Some meetings often end up as a general talking-shop where everyone feels the need to voice their opinion. And meeting attendance just seems to grow week on week, with more and more people added to the invite list.
I know of so many people that complain about the number of meetings they have – and, ironically, they are often the ones that talk the most during those meetings! But how many people ever question the need for a meeting?
In my project we’ve been looking at the number and length of all our recurring meetings, and have tried to re-focus ones that have got off-track. Some meetings have been shortened, some made less frequent, and some have reduced the number of attendees. We also created a matrix to describe what job roles have mandatory or optional attendance at meeting, which helps people determine if they can legitimately skip something.
The up-shot is that one meeting, which used to last occur twice a week for an hour with around 20 attendees, is now just 30 minutes once a week with 8 attendees – freeing up a total of 36 hours of people’s time. Just think of the productivity! It’s like hiring an extra person, and that’s just from one of our meetings.