Oh no, not another meeting!
TO meet or not to meet? That is the question . . . well, the question that keeps bosses like me trying to work out the best way to deal with the challenges of sharing information effectively and not wasting people’s time and wearing out their patience with mindless meetings.
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of the world’s largest online shopping retailer Amazon, is among the richest people in the world.
In fact, for one day in late July he was number one, with an estimated fortune of about $113 billion.
One assumes he knows a thing or two about running a successful business and meetings.
A few years ago, Mr Bezos shared his thoughts about productive meetings and his first point: the more people attending, the less productive most meetings will be.
Apparently he has a “two pizza rule”: never have a meeting where two pizzas can’t feed all the people in the room.
Meetings are the bane of many offices, a dreaded work interruption where it sometimes feels like you’re drowning in a sea of white noise with plenty of people talking, but not achieving much at all.
So what’s the answer, and in a world where time is money, how do you get the best bang for your buck when it comes to those necessary staff meetings?
Apparently one technique is to stop calling them “meetings” which intrinsically translates for some of us as code for “boring”. The theory is that you up the ante by changing the nomenclature to calling a get together something like a “pow wow” or a “huddle” or a “team brainstorm”.
And then forget trooping into the boardroom with the boss sitting at the head of the table.
Bored-room is out and “deals on wheels” might by the way to go. I’ve read of one company where if there’s no more than five people involved in a necessary chat, they jump in the car, turn up the music and drive their way to resolving a challenge, solving a problem or chewing the fat about business development. Really.
Then there’s the relatively new ergonomic view of catching up, standing up.
Given so many office workers spend so many hours sitting and the debate about the debilitating health effects of being sedentary, the standing meeting is now all the go in many companies.
Research has suggested that standing meetings are invariably shorter, possibly by as much as 30 to 40 per cent and people feel like standing demands a more active presence and it’s much harder to take a sneaky look at their phone to check emails and the like.
An agenda to keep people on track is also a sensible way to define what needs to be covered in your huddle, pow wow, brainstorm or standing meeting. It also gives people a sense of the perimeters of a discussion and when it’s likely to be finished.
So how to deal with that one person who invariably likes to hold court in a get together and is clearly beguiled by the sound of their own voice?
One theory I like involves having a weighty medicine ball in the room, which gets passed to whoever needs to speak. When the ball starts to feel heavy, that’s the not-so-subtle hint it’s time to pass it on.
Other businesses are a fan of the “set time limit” meeting with many locking in a 15 minute window.
Scientifically, 15 minutes fits right in with the research on attention spans of 10 to 18 minutes for most people.
The other benefit of a set 15 minute or so agenda is that you can reasonably ban mobile phones. It’s not unreasonable for people to disconnect from their electronic life support for that long.
So we’re about to jump in the car and head off for a 14 minute scoot around the waterfront and solve the problems of the world. Driving and juggling the medicine ball may be a challenge. Leigh McClusky is the Managing Director, McCo Group