A Chinese friend once told me: “Why stand when you can seat, why seat when you can lay down?” (the apology of laziness, lol). But HR mindset generally is: “Why give quick call when I can have a meeting, why have a 30min meeting if I can have an 1hr meeting?”
Just like processes, meetings are considered “deliverables” by many professionals –”goals to meet prospect clients” “meetings to gather input on something” “meeting to communicate something”! Once the majority of support departments don’t focus on RESULTS, meetings tend to be considered the biggest delivery possible. And that’s the part HR likes most! “Sure, let’s have a meeting to discuss it” or “we work with HR, it’s subjective, that’s why we need two-hours meetings” or “we need lots of meeting time to discuss things deeply”.
Well, I’m against teambuilding. Against offsites. And I am against meetings!
For every meeting, every process that I am involved I keep a track of how valuable and how productive it is. RETURN-ON-INVESTMENT (ON TIME!). HR-PROFIT-MACHINE! Sometimes I am invited that lasts for two hours. Sometimes, for six-hours meetings. All the time I calculate all the man-hour of everyone involved. I agonize. I think about money flowing in the drain. I think that I could be delivering something valuable in the meanwhile, with real impact. And seriously – there are only two or three meetings that I attended to my whole life that the end result would be affected if we decided to cut the total meeting time in 50%.
After lots of bad experience, I recommend the following:
- Always question if a meeting is necessary (seriously, I found out I can reduce the quantity of meetings by 50% only by asking who invited if “do we really need a meeting or is something that a quick chat by phone would solve?”) – people are not used to be questioned on that, and you may soon note that your meetings are dropping fantastically!
- Always ask people to cut meeting duration by 50% (I got surprised on how productive it can be doing meetings with 50% of the time you are used without losing content – just add more structure and focus!)
- Always ask who is really necessary to be in the meeting – or in some cases, ask just for 1 representative of each department (incredible how support areas – such as HR, Compliance etc – have “professional meeting attendees”)
- Always ask “is this meeting to discuss something or to decide”? And try to attend more to the later (there are several ways to discuss a subject without being in a meeting)
People will agonize. Resist. Will say it is impossible, that you need more time. But you need to resist. Insist on cutting. Insisting in being more productive, in focusing your attention in what really matters, in what will create the difference.
Of course you can achieve good results in a 4-hours meeting. But what results at what costs? If I can achieve 95% of results in 30 minutes and 96% in four hours, is this marginal 1% really worth 3.5 more hours in your life? What impacts could you generate on the spare time?
So be merciless with meetings! Go against the flow, shut your ears with those cries demanding more of your strategic time. And after a brief period of turbulence (due to the resistance) be ready to be more effective, do things that really matter and have more time for living outside work too!
WE ARE HERE TO HAVE HIGH IMPACT, TO DELIVER STRONG RESULTS, NOT TO HAVE MEETINGS!
Best,
Best,
What are you looking for?
Still without time? Other ways to make meetings more effective!
Better interview techniques? Take a look at this killer method!
Best performance and reward strategy? Stop with Goal Setting!
Setting your company mission? There is an easier way for getting better results!
Setting a meritocratic culture? Here is an easy-to-implement plan!
A new breed of HR? Goodbye aunties!
