Meetings: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
They
interrupt flow, and pop up unbidden on your iCal. They tend to convey all of
the information you already knew and none of the things you really wanted to
know. Meetings have emerged as one of the most universally despised conventions
of American work life, and they show no sign of letting up. But if workers and
managers alike feel put upon by meetings, experts say it’s not meetings per
se that are the culprit. The problem is bad meetings.
Wharton
management professor Nancy Rothbard says that if we are meeting more often
than ever, it may be because we are now so busy we have to schedule time to
simply think. “There are so many demands on us that leaders are scheduling
meetings to get people engaged in the problem at hand,” she says. “I think
people call meetings so they can have people’s mindshare, when it might have
been more efficient to work through a problem independently.”
“We’ve
accepted mediocrity around our meetings, and that permeates everything,” says
Patrick Lencioni, president of the Table Group and author of the books Death
by Meeting and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. “The problem is too often they are
boring, and boring in a meeting happens for the same reason as in a book or
movie — when there is not enough compelling tension. Meetings should be
intense. Twitter There should be this sense
of angst, that if we don’t make a good decision in this meeting something bad
is going to happen to us.”
Bad
things, in fact, can and do spring from bad meetings, says organizational
psychologist Roger Schwarz, president and CEO of Roger Schwarz &
Associates. “When people are attending bad meetings and that is the pattern,
they either check out or they act out,” he says. “By checking out they may be
physically there but not engaged and contributing.”
Checking
out could mean that a group is meeting virtually and “I’ve got you on mute and
I’m doing several other tasks,” Schwarz adds. “Or it could be I find reasons
not to go to the meetings. In the act-out category is people acting ways that
are ineffective. And there are organizational level outcomes. If you have
people at the meeting who are not fully engaged, that means they are not
sharing relevant information. And if you don’t have full commitment, it takes
longer to make decisions and your costs will be higher.”
Meeting Saturation
“A
meeting is a place where you keep the minutes and throw away the hours,” author
and former Xerox executive Thomas Kayser has said. It’s a widely held view.
Many workers would rather be doing something else — anything else, according to
one sampling. Nearly half, or 46%, of 2,066 American adults polled in a
Harris/Clarizen poll said they would endure “any unpleasant activity” over
sitting in a meeting, with 18% of that 46% saying they would prefer a trip to
the DMV, 17% preferring to watch paint dry, and 8% stating that they would take
a root canal over sitting in a status meeting.
“People call meetings so they can have people’s
mindshare, when it might have been more efficient to work through a problem
independently.”–Nancy Rothbard
Leadingly
tongue-in-cheek questions aside, respondents to the 2015 poll said that each
week they spent 4.6 hours preparing for and 4.5 hours attending general status
meetings — up from the same poll conducted in 2011, but only slightly. In fact,
meeting-weary workers are nothing new, says Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell. “Meetings have been a big part of
organizational life for a long time,” he says. “Maybe 10 or 12 years ago I
remember a friend at a credit card company telling me the joke that you knew
you had arrived when not only were you spending all your time in meetings, but
all the people you were meeting with were also spending all their time in
meetings.”
Meeting
time studies have charted a rise for more than half a century. Executives were
spending an average of 3.5 hours a week in planned meetings, plus more in
informal meetings, reported a study by Rollie Tillman, Jr., published in 1960
in the Harvard Business Review. By 1973, the number had doubled,
according to results of a study by P.L. Rice published in Business
Horizons. By 1989, the typical manager was spending between 25% and 80% of
his or her day in meetings, according to “A Profile of Meetings in Corporate
America: Results of the 3M Meeting Effectiveness Study,” by P. Monge, C.
McSween and J. Wyer.
What
might be adding to greater meeting misery today are the dual — and perhaps
interrelated — factors of time and technology. There is a general perception of
a speed-up in the workplace — that workers are just busier, and that tools like
email, Google Docs and instant messaging can get the job done more quickly and
efficiently than meetings. (Novelty company Buyolympia sells a blue ribbon with
the gold-embossed message: “I survived another meeting that should have been an
email.”)
“One
of the things that I think is driving people to feel put upon by meetings is
that people are generally working longer hours and they’ve got more demands on
them, and they are being expected to multitask,” says Schwarz. “And so people
look at meetings with an eye toward, ‘Is this is a good use of my time?’ It’s a
reasonable question to ask, and for a lot of people the answer is no.”
Rothbard
says two factors might be contributing to an increase in meetings:
globalization, and the jobs themselves. “Work is becoming more complex and
interdependent,” she notes. “When we have more interdependence in work, we have
to interact with each other — ‘I can’t do my work without you.’ Complexity
entails multiple different specialties coming together. In thinking about what
it takes to put together a semiconductor, it is not just one person working in
a garage. All of the innovation that comes about to make those chips better
comes about because of the interaction with a lot of folks.”
Such
interaction often involves meeting across the span of many time zones. “We’re
not meeting with the person down the hall; this is not necessarily the person
who has the expertise we require,” Rothbard says. “So we are trying to bring
the best people to the table, the virtual table, and too often we are having
meetings at terrible times. People are twisting themselves into pretzels for a
time slot that works for a global team.”
Technology
is, she continues, a double-edged sword. “It’s enabling us to actually reach
the best people and allowing things to happen that could not happen before, but
it is potentially making things more burdensome from a process standpoint.”
Bidwell
— who admits that his heart often sinks when he sees a meeting on his calendar,
particularly a large meeting — says that meetings can feel burdensome, “because
they don’t feel like proper work,” but in fact, they are. “The rationale is
coordination, which is a function of organization, to bring together a lot of
different people who do a lot of different things. Rules are one way of
achieving coordination, but the more complex the issue, the more you have to
sit down and work through things. Face-to-face you get the richest
communication — you read body language, you learn much more and faster.”
Media
richness theory confirms as much. The framework developed by Richard L. Daft
and Robert H. Lengel is no less true today than when it was introduced three
decades ago — that the more ambiguous the task, the richer the communication
medium required to get the job done. While email and calls may be appropriate
for certain kinds of questions, they lack the social cues of face-to-face
meetings — glances, intimation and bonding — and are therefore not always
efficacious to working through other issues. “The potential to have
misunderstandings in a less rich media format is huge,” says Rothbard. “When people
have these misunderstandings they can blow up, and that’s when you get email
flaming, or people sending email back and forth and nothing is getting
resolved.” With each step removed from face-to-face communication, something
gets lost.
“When people are attending bad meetings and
that is the pattern, they either check out or they act out.”–Roger Schwarz
On the
other hand, technology may be catching up. Tools like Skype, says Rothbard,
have “an amazing ability that allows you to get a lot of information that you
weren’t getting over email or over the phone. It allows you to develop a sense
of knowing the person better.” Large-scale immersive video screens like Cisco’s
TelePresence — which are set up to create the illusion that people in different
locations are in a single conference room — provide a richer array of cues.
Says Rothbard: “The only thing you can’t do is kick the person under the
table.”
We Must Stop Meeting Like
This
Workers
will go to great length to avoid meetings, and to convince their bosses that
they are a waste of time and money. Apps such as Meeting Calc allow users to
enter the hourly rates of attendees to come up with a grand total for how much
meetings are costing. “It takes a really good meeting to be better than no
meeting at all. And this app makes it clear how costly meetings can be,” says
the sales blurb. But rather than striving for fewer meetings, workers and
managers should focus on being smarter about when meetings are really needed,
and on how to conduct the much needed managed interdependence they offer in a
more concise, organized manner. “Meetings are the linchpin of everything,” says
Lencioni. “If someone says you have an hour to investigate a company, I
wouldn’t look at the balance sheet. I’d watch their executive team in a meeting
for an hour. If they are clear and focused and have the board on the edge of
their seats, I’d say this is a good company worth investing in.”
Lencioni
recommends sorting out meetings into four types, each with its own objective.
The first is a once-a-day meeting for five or 10 minutes. “Standing up and
checking in with each other saves so much time and energy,” he says. “Teams
that do this for 28 days realize it’s crucial to keeping everyone from going
off the rails.” The second type is the staff meeting. “This is the meeting
people always think they are having, but really should be on a tactical subject
you’ve already agreed to, to see how progress is — ‘how are we doing on
customer service?’ ‘What are our key metrics telling us?’ And that’s all you’re
doing.” The third is a longer meeting, a couple of hours long, for big,
strategic topics. “This is for ‘what are we going to do about the competition’s
new product?’ — to wrestle that issue to the ground. This is why people go into
business, but business professors would be shocked to learn that nearly all
those meetings happen for only 15 minutes. You need to carve out time to do
that right.” The last kind of meeting is a quarterly one, when “the team needs
to step away and ask, ‘how are we doing?'”
If
done right, Lencioni says, all these meetings combined should take up no more
than 15% of staff time. “Do you really think that 15% of your time — if administered
with real clarity, solving problems that are preventing the organization from
succeeding — that anyone would say that’s not worth it?”
Schwarz
notes that “people hate going to meetings and find all sorts of creative ways
of avoiding them.” And yet, he says, there is a series of remedies — starting
with “really asking the most fundamental question, which is, ‘What does this
group have to meet about?’ A lot of times people find themselves in a room
where they are not interdependent with the other people around the task, and
that is the first sign that you are about to not use your time well and, for
that matter, not use other peoples’ time well.”
“Face-to-face you get the richest
communication — you read body language, you learn much more and faster.”–Matthew
Bidwell
Once
you have the right people in the room, the next question is: What is the
purpose of the meeting? “That may sound pretty obvious,” notes Lencioni, “but
it’s amazing how many times people come together and are not really clear about
the purpose. One is to make a decision or have a discussion that will lead to a
decision. Or is the purpose to give updates and share information? A lot of
times people find themselves in a meeting where the primary purpose is to
receive information, and that’s a poor use of people’s time. Those meetings can
be easily dispensed with and can be an email instead that people read in their
own time. The majority of meetings should be discussions that lead to
decisions.”
It
helps to give people the agenda of an upcoming meeting in advance, and in the
form of a question, says Schwarz. Rather than putting, say, “space
allocation” in the subject line of an email, it is more helpful to frame the
issue as a question — something like, “How are we going to allocate space on our
floor given the new hires?” That way, “people can come to the meeting
having thought about the question, and they can figure out during the
conversation how to contribute in a way that’s on track. You know when the
conversation is finished — it’s when you’ve answered the question. That simple
technique can be very powerful.”
Rothbard
says preparation before a meeting is key — preparation by everyone attending.
“We’re so busy that we just don’t prepare, and when we don’t prepare there is a
lot of wasted time. And that’s incredibly frustrating, because the problem is …
it’s not across the board. Some people come in super prepared, and those are
the people who are most frustrated, while the people who are less prepared are
thinking, ‘thank goodness we’re meeting; I finally have time to think about
this.’ That’s really challenging, and it’s partly because of all of the
pressure on us in the way that the world has sped up.”
Technology
has opened up potentialities for meetings that did not exist before, but the
development of even more sophisticated technology does not hold out the promise
of a rescue from bad meetings. “Because the amount of information flying at
people is going to distract them and get them off track,” says Lencioni. “And
so having good meetings and getting them to resolve issues is more important
than ever. Despite all of the technology out there, the table is still the most
important piece of technology.”
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/meetings-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2015-09-16
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