Eliminating Non-Productive Meetings

Eliminating Non-productive Meetings

How much time do you spend preparing and having meetings?  How effective are your meetings?

Meetings, physical and virtual,  are essential to modern business life. However there are some very worrying statistics out there. For example :

  • The cost in lost productivity due to meetings in 2019 in the USA was estimated around USD400 billion.
  • The number of meetings we hold has risen by 8-10% per year during the last 20 years.
  • In a survey, 47% of respondents said that meetings were the biggest cause of lost time at work
  • In another survey, 45% of respondents said they feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they have to participate in.
  • The average delay to the start of a meeting is 11 minutes. For executives, it rises to 16 minutes.
Sources: Doodle, Booqued, Ovum, Dialapad

Simple maths can show that, for an office staff of 100 people, the non-productive aspects of routine meetings can imply having - as a minimum - around 10  people doing nothing all day. Every day!

Consider that, prior to the explosion of videoconferencing, typically the entire office staff  spent some 15% of their time in meetings, middle managers up to 30%-40% and Executives/Directors  up to 90% of their time. Now it's probably much higher. 

And Executives say that they consider almost 70% of meetings unproductive or a waste of time.

Whilst many companies might admit that the number and productivity of their meetings is an issue, rarely do they take the time to evaluate and quantify the magnitude of the problem, preferring to live with the status quo accepting it as the way things are.  

It is an endemic problem and is not just about better in-meeting discipline. A quantification of the problem in terms of time or money very quickly gets attention!

I have developed a proprietary methodology based on what I call my FRIED EGG ANALOGY, which allows efficient diagnosis and the facilitated design and implementation of solutions to correct the meeting malaise so endemic in today's business world.
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                                              Do you have meeting sickness? 
I can help with:
  • Process based and efficient diagnostics for meeting efficiency evaluation using proprietary methodologies. 
  • Analysis and design of solutions. 
  • Facilitation training 
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