Curse of the ‘meetheads’
Gary Martin warns of meeting mania.
IT is the management habit that has workers around the globe united in loathing: meeting mania. The need to attend an endless number of meetings can suck the soul out of us and often ends up being as enjoyable as root canal surgery.
We have all been part of the drill. We stagger into the room with our colleagues. A few key people speak and make decisions while others are lost in space thinking about what to have for lunch.
A groundbreaking new international report, The State of Meetings 2019, has cast a cloud over the entire meeting agenda by confirming what many of us long suspected — too much of our working week is chewed up with countless and purposeless meetings.
In fact, 44 per cent of the 6500 respondents said they lost valuable time because of unnecessary meetings and 43 per cent claimed that meetings often left them more confused.
In fairness, a certain number of office meetings are needed to keep people informed and to facilitate decision-making — and some bosses do lead meetings exceptionally well. Meetings can be purposeful, motivating and even morale-boosting.
But more often than not the meeting mania that has pervaded many organisations takes up too much time, produces too few results and causes workplace productivity to disappear faster than a hairpiece in a hurricane.
The list of complaints from workers is endless: there are too many meetings or they are too long, their purpose is unclear or there are no agendas, the meeting is overcrowded, the wrong people are in attendance, one or two colleagues steal the show, attendees arrive late, people talk in circles, conversations veer off track, colleagues are cut off midsentence, people are checking their devices, and hefty doses of analysis paralysis are triggered by endless debates rather than decisions.
Despite the undisguised contempt for this work activity, experts believe that meeting madness is on the rise. Impotent bosses are jumping on the bandwagon even though our ever-evolving technology has provided a smorgasbord of more efficient alternatives.
Ineffective bosses, call them “meetheads”, continue to idolise office meetings for all the wrong reasons; malevolent managers to create an illusion of inclusion, insecure bosses to bark out orders to protect turf and reinforce their position, and micromanagers who simply cannot resist the temptation to call meetings to scrutinise and control even the most diligent of workers.
And most workers are only too familiar with those escapee bosses who spend their entire working days flitting from one meeting to another to create a mirage of effectiveness despite the reality that they are often simply avoiding the tough work.
We will never completely get away from the adverse meeting culture that pervades many workplaces. But remember that we can always get more done with fewer meetings that are run well.