Frustrated Review Again Frustrated Cartoon Face
In Brief
The Challenge
Meetings are supposed to improve creativity and productivity—merely they practise the opposite when they're excessive, badly scheduled, poorly run, or all 3. These problems take a toll on the whole arrangement, and they require systemic fixes.
The Solution
Groups must starting time figure out what kind of time their meetings tend to waste matter—group, individual, or both. They can and then follow a v-stride process for change: (1) collect impressions from each member; (2) interpret those together; (three) cull a grouping goal for improving meetings that feels personally relevant and motivating; (4) measure progress; and (five) regularly check in to make sure people don't revert to former patterns.
Poking fun at meetings is the stuff of Dilbert cartoons—we can all joke near how soul-sucking and painful they are. Merely that pain has existent consequences for teams and organizations. In our interviews with hundreds of executives, in fields ranging from loftier tech and retail to pharmaceuticals and consulting, many said they felt overwhelmed past their meetings—whether formal or informal, traditional or active, face-to-confront or electronically mediated. One said, "I cannot get my caput above water to breathe during the week." Some other described stabbing her leg with a pencil to stop from screaming during a peculiarly torturous staff meeting. Such complaints are supported past research showing that meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past l years, to the point where executives spend an boilerplate of nearly 23 hours a calendar week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. And that doesn't fifty-fifty include all the impromptu gatherings that don't make information technology onto the schedule.
Much has been written about this problem, just the solutions posed are usually discrete: Establish a clear agenda, hold your meeting continuing upward, delegate someone to nourish in your place, and so on. We've observed in our research and consulting that real improvement requires systemic alter, because meetings impact how people collaborate and how they get their own piece of work done.
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However change of such telescopic is rarely considered. When we probed into why people put up with the strain that meetings place on their time and sanity, nosotros plant something surprising: Those who resent and dread meetings the most also defend them as a "necessary evil"—sometimes with great passion. Consider this excerpt from the corporate blog of a senior executive in the pharmaceutical industry:
I believe that our abundance of meetings at our company is the Cultural Revenue enhancement we pay for the inclusive, learning environs that we want to foster…and I'm ok with that. If the alternative to more than meetings is more autocratic controlling, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more than meetings any time!
To exist sure, meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation. They oft foster relationships and ensure proper data substitution. They provide real benefits. But why would anyone debate in defense of excessive meetings, especially when no one likes them much?
Because executives want to exist good soldiers. When they sacrifice their own time and well-being for meetings, they assume they're doing what's best for the business organization—and they don't run across the costs to the organization. They overlook the commonage toll on productivity, focus, and engagement.
For one thing, fourth dimension is nothing-sum. Every infinitesimal spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that's equally essential for creativity and efficiency. For another, schedules riddled with meetings interrupt "deep work"—a term that the Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport uses to depict the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding job. (In a contempo study, managers across the board in the U.s.a. and Cathay told us that this happens "far besides often!") As a consequence, people tend to come up to work early on, stay late, or use weekends for placidity fourth dimension to concentrate.
Another issue is the potent price companies pay for badly run meetings. For example, Simone Kauffeld, of Technische Universität Braunschweig, and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, of the University of Amsterdam, found in a written report of 20 organizations from the automotive supply, metal, electric, chemic, and packaging industries that dysfunctional coming together behaviors (including wandering off topic, complaining, and criticizing) were associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability.
Happiness at piece of work takes a hit too. A study by Steven Rogelberg, of the University of North Carolina, and colleagues showed that how workers feel near the effectiveness of meetings correlates with their general satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their jobs, even afterward controlling for personality traits and environmental factors such as work design, supervision, and pay. Instead of improving communication and collaboration, every bit intended, bad meetings undermine those things. Consider the executive who stabbed her leg with a pencil. Did that staff coming together advance teamwork or set it back? A few positive experiences a week cannot make up for a lot of excruciating, wasteful ones.
We surveyed 182 senior managers in a range of industries: 65% said meetings go on them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. 64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking. 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring the team closer together.
The skillful news is, we've constitute that changing the way your squad and your organization approach meetings is possible. In this article we depict a five-footstep process for that—forth with the diagnostic work you lot'll need to do in advance. Frequently the results can exist dramatic and extend far beyond the conference room. At a fiscal and regulatory consultancy we studied, for example, three months after managers began to rethink the firm'south arroyo to meetings, a survey showed that employees perceived significant improvements in squad collaboration (a 42% increase), psychological safety to speak up and express opinions (a 32% increase), and team performance (a 28% increase). Other aspects of organizational life improved equally well, and respondents' ratings of satisfaction with work/life balance rose from 62% to 92%.
We accept seen how much organizations can benefit when they focus their free energy on transforming meetings instead of just tolerating them. Here's how to identify and address the meeting problems your group may face.
How Is Your Grouping Vulnerable?
Bug ensue when meetings are scheduled and run without regard to their affect on both group and solo work fourth dimension. Ofttimes groups end upward sacrificing commonage or private needs—or both—by default. Balancing those needs effectively is ideal, but few organizations practise that. In a contempo survey we conducted with nearly 200 senior executives from diverse industries, only 17% reported that their meetings are generally productive uses of group and individual time. Other respondents said their meetings fall into 1 of these categories:
Wasters of grouping time.
Some organizations have relatively few meetings simply run them poorly. As a upshot, individuals have sufficient time for solo tasks and deep thinking, but group productivity and collaboration are weakened because each meeting is inefficient. Nearly 16% of the executives in our sample said this is true where they work.
A squad at a global e-commerce visitor we studied had but one or 2 meetings a week, only they still felt like a waste of group time for several reasons. First, hours and locations often changed at the last infinitesimal, and then many people arrived unprepared or didn't come at all. Second, the agenda was often vague or redundant with side conversations that had already occurred, so the meetings felt like a rubber-stamping of decisions fabricated elsewhere. Third, when new bug were raised, side by side steps were usually left unclear, leading to more sidebar conversations exterior the room. 1 software developer told us that he kept showing upwards for the meetings fifty-fifty though he rarely got annihilation out of them, because his attendance was expected by his manager and everyone else. As a workaround, he covertly did his own tasks during meeting time. While this may seem like a harmless way to maintain individual productivity in the short term, information technology causes grouping productivity and esprit to deteriorate over the long term. When people don't contribute to the give-and-take or pay attention to what's being said, the team fails to reap the full benefits of convening, and the meeting wastes everyone'south time.
Wasters of individual time.
Sometimes meetings are relatively high in quality and therefore technically a good employ of group time—but individuals' time dissipates because the sheer quantity of meetings crowds out solo work, and poor scheduling disrupts critical deep thinking. In our survey of executives, 13% said that their organizations struggle with this particular problem.
Hither'south an case of how it plays out: One private disinterestedness firm nosotros examined had a rigorous protocol for running effective meetings. For each session, prework was sent out with adequate notice, clear goals were established, and coming together time was managed against an calendar. Group updates and decisions were consequently handled efficiently. Withal, as the business firm grew over time, more than and more than meetings were added to the weekly agenda. Although they were well run, their sheer volume interrupted work flow and took abroad time that the investment staff could dedicate to critical individual tasks, such as sourcing new opportunities and deepening relationships with managers at companies the firm owned or sought to own. Equally this firm's experience demonstrates, excessive meetings strength people to make merchandise-offs concerning how and when to accomplish their solo piece of work. Sometimes tasks get dropped or shortchanged. But more frequently people steal from their personal time to get that work washed, a cede that research and practice accept shown can pb to exhaustion and turnover—steep prices for both employees and organizations.
Wasters of both individual and group fourth dimension.
Many organizations we have worked with endure the triple whammy of meetings that are (ane) too frequent, (2) poorly timed, and (iii) desperately run, leading to losses in productivity, collaboration, and well-being for both groups and individuals. This is the worst-example scenario—and, unfortunately, the nearly prevalent. The majority of our survey respondents—54%—put their meetings in this category.
One manager at a pharmaceutical company described finding herself in a ane- to two-hour "market readiness" meeting every other week considering the organizer actually wanted her to nourish, claiming that everyone's input was extraordinarily valuable. Nonetheless, the group too typically sent out slide decks for the team to review in advance and so just walked through those decks during the meetings. As this manager asked herself and her team, "Why would y'all need to become one person from each subteam from every section into a room only to go over each slide individually when you've already sent u.s.a. the entire deck?" Her squad members commiserated, reporting that they each attended scores of similarly wasteful meetings that left them with little or no time for their "existent piece of work" throughout the twenty-four hours. In situations like this, grouping time is wasted and private time is obliterated.
Striking the Correct Rest
Unfortunately, individuals tin't solve these problems on their own. Just think how many times you've tried to reduce the number of meetings on your calendar—probably with limited success. Because so many people are involved in scheduling and running the meetings we attend, it takes a commonage effort to fix them.
However, with a structured approach to analyzing and changing meeting patterns throughout your team or unit, you tin can brand meaning improvements. We've seen groups escape the coming together trap by working together to follow five bones steps:
1. Collect data from each person.
To get a clearer view of how meetings are affecting your group, use surveys or interviews to get together data and impressions from every individual. That will assist y'all guess the full extent of the problem: You'll learn how much resentment is bubbling under the surface and how much work isn't getting washed during the day.
2. Translate the data together.
Side by side, information technology's critical to come up together as a team or a unit of measurement to digest anybody'due south feedback and analyze what is working and what is not. This must be an open up, nonjudgmental discussion of the survey or interview findings. Neutral facilitators can assistance keep the conversation constructive. However, delegating the data interpretation to an outside consultant—or even merely a subset of the team—tin can undermine success. You'll need contributions and analysis from all team members to generate the widespread agreement and buy-in required for the remaining steps.
At the financial and regulatory consultancy we studied, for example, exploratory interviews revealed that meetings were chopping upward calendars so badly that very few two- or three-hour blocks were left for deep-thinking piece of work. Without enough quiet time to concentrate, the consultants felt that their creativity and productivity were being sapped. These disclosures served equally a wake-up phone call for the managers who had been scheduling meetings without a full awareness of the impact they were having.
3. Agree on a collective, personally relevant goal.
We have establish that personally benefiting from the group's initiative is a bully motivator. For case, you might designate a sure amount of time each week for people to focus on independent work—whether in the office or at home. Giving them such flexibility and liberty can provide necessary relief in their schedules, along with an incentive to make the arrangement work. Declaring "meeting free" periods also forces the whole grouping to reevaluate meetings that were normally scheduled during those times and to ask who really needs to nourish. Equally a consequence, nosotros detect, teams agree fewer meetings overall, and fewer people get to each one. The boosted "white space" in anybody's calendar increases individual productivity and reduces the spillover into personal fourth dimension.
Here's how this arroyo worked at a engineering consultancy nosotros examined: Members were based in the United States and India, and then a handoff meeting was held each day—early in the morning for some and late at night for others to suit the 12.v-hour time difference. The long days were causing significant stress and fatigue on both sides: Early-morning calls were required, family unit dinners were missed, workdays were more than than 12 hours long. Once the team had nerveless survey data from its members and realized the magnitude of the problem, it altered its approach: Each person was given 1 workday a week when he or she didn't have to participate in the handoff call.
In order to ensure the appropriate information commutation, team members had to notice ways to embrace for i another and keep anybody updated. Learning how to do that gave individuals the suspension they needed, but information technology also resulted in more shared cognition and versatility in the group. Furthermore, people gained a deeper understanding of their colleagues' piece of work, which led to better-integrated offerings for customers.
4. Gear up milestones and monitor progress.
Equally with any change effort, information technology is important that concrete and measurable progress be assessed and discussed along the style. Small, tangible wins provide something for people to celebrate, and pocket-size losses provide opportunities for learning and correction. Consider this example: At a global e-commerce company, a team of 30 employees spanning the United states and China told us that their weekly all-easily meetings were a hurting signal. Attendees were often on their phones or laptops. Considering people were continually distracted, those who spoke had to repeat themselves frequently, making the time spent not just longer but likewise much less constructive. To assist accost these problems, the team decided on a simple, tractable goal: Allow no outside technology at the meetings.
At start several song engineers and even the team leader were resistant, feeling that they should have the right to employ their devices, peculiarly when meetings became deadening or turned to topics outside their purview. For a while after the initiative was launched, friendly reminders ("No tech, man!") were necessary. But over time the new norm took concord, and even the manager self-corrected when he instinctively started to cheque his phone. The team began to come across the benefits of this experiment. Meetings became more than productive, and people were more engaged. As 1 engineer said, "This no-tech dominion is fantastic! Now that people are more focused on the meeting, it's more efficient." Another team fellow member started bringing a notebook to jot downwardly thoughts rather than playing games on her phone. This small victory opened the door to setting other new norms, such as preparing materials more thoroughly ahead of time, keeping meetings every bit brief as possible, and ultimately reworking meeting cadences to better fit the team members' schedules.
5. Regularly debrief as a group.
Finally, we have found that it is disquisitional to regularly and openly have stock of how people feel about the meetings they attend and most their piece of work process more generally. Frustration, resentment, and even hopelessness are signals that people are falling dorsum into bad patterns. Moreover, changing protocols and behaviors takes time, and sustaining momentum requires consistent attending and contact.
At a pharmaceutical visitor we worked with, the global medical-affairs division established 2 regular "pulse checks" to monitor the progress of an experiment it was conducting with meeting-complimentary days: 1 check within the subteam and one across the partition. At the beginning of each pulse check, participants answered four questions: How are you feeling? How valuable are the ways in which you lot are spending your fourth dimension? How well are yous working every bit a team? Is this sustainable?
The answers to these questions triggered substantive discussions, rich in emotional, strategic, and tactical content. Early on conversations focused specifically on the coming together problem, but over fourth dimension they increasingly addressed how team members approached their piece of work—and one another. One manager said, "I'm impressed with how these meetings have immune people to open up, particularly with [the manager] listening….Pulse checks are really insightful—they give me a good dose of reality…and they surfaced issues that resulted in more cantankerous-coverage, people development, and teamwork. It sounds crazy that this picayune experiment could create these sorts of results, but it has profound implications far across the initial goal."
Nosotros suggest cursory weekly bank check-ins for a few months, until the new norms, processes, and attitudes are in place. Afterward that, every other calendar week should practise it. Regardless of the frequency of pulse checks, people should have regular, structured forums in which to express their frustrations and surface problems besides as to improve how the team works together.
For all these steps, leadership back up is critical—but information technology doesn't necessarily need to come from the C-suite. We have found that a grouping can modify its arroyo to meetings as long as the team leader has the authorisation to encourage people to raise bug, take risks, brand mistakes, and discover new ways of working together. This tin can happen even if the group is closely connected to other groups in the organization. For example, the global medical-affairs division's refusal to attend interdivisional meetings on meeting-free days was met first with consternation, so with marvel, and ultimately with modify throughout the organization as norms were shattered and new means of working were modeled.
A Conduit for Alter
As nosotros have witnessed at multiple companies in a range of industries, altering something equally basic as meetings can take far-reaching implications. Ane manager reflected, "Nosotros started communicating more openly and honestly, which enabled u.s. to meliorate help each other….We helped each other prioritize, nosotros helped each other find access to other resource, and sometimes we reallocated tasks or simply helped each other practise the work."
Meetings do not accept to be a trap; they tin can be a conduit for change. A process like this one can improve productivity, communication, and integration of the team's work, not to mention job satisfaction and work/life balance. In the end, ameliorate meetings—and ameliorate work lives—result.
A version of this article appeared in the July–August 2017 issue (pp.62–69) of Harvard Business Review.
Source: https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
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