The Good, The Bad(ly organized) and The Ugly meetings

 

There have been a lot of discussion and debate about meetings – how inefficient they can be if not properly managed.

But meetings can be not only inefficient, they can be totally useless too. They just add costs and waste time. And time is our most precious resource. We should use it wisely.

So how can we identify, which meetings are good, which are just badly organized and which are useless and ugly.

What is the most common reason to have a meeting? In most cases we have to go through some topics TOGETHER in order to get new information or insights about the subject.

Only in the very beginning – like kick-off meeting in the project start – the meeting can have a communicational aspect: someone has to give the core information of the project or task. But when the ”show” has started you should be cautious when, how often and WHY a meeting should be held.

In very rigid organizations one meeting category is the so called STATUS meeting. Management wants to know where the project is right now and participants have done a lot of work to show their ”best”. In matrix organizations you might have this kind of reporting sessions many times a week.

A second meeting category is the PANIC meeting. When everything is going to the dogs, people are called to the crisis meeting in order get things back on the track. Some organizations might have these meetings all the time.

These meetings represent two extremities but they share one thing in common: CRITICAL THINGS HAVE HAPPENED ALREADY.

In many meetings 80% of time is spend on history! We describe to each other what has happened, why it happened an so on. In theory, we could learn something, but I doubt that happens very often.

Then what should we do? Give-up all meetings? Not a bad idea – but let’s think this still over.

A meeting is a part of the work and should not be separated from actual doing. The most important thing is to realize, that you should push things FORWARD and not only reflect what has happened. And this is very crucial on both types of meetings described above.

Meetings that focus on WHAT HAS HAPPENED instead of WHAT WILL WE DO are useless.

I have participated – and I have to admit also being in charge of – in projects where most of meetings have been either status or panic ones. And in some cases the worst thing was not that we wasted a lot of money, but that we lost something which was invaluable. We have to remember, that o’clock is ticking also during the meetings!

So is there anything that we could do? Maybe the the best we can do is that we should try to keep ”meetings” as a working sessions. If we keep minutes, we should put efforts to the things that are in future. We should MANAGE during meetings NOT afterwards and we should have a common understanding of what is going on and what we are trying to achieve.

Our recommendations:
STATUS MEETINGS	You should have these on a minimum amount. Do not schedule these too many. Try to get management IN THE project instead of giving them reports.
PANIC MEETINGS	You cannot always avoid these, sorry! Keep always a memo (as easy as possible) where you define actions and decisions with responsibles and definite due dates
Video VS. Face-2-face	In the beginning when you don’t know participants yet, meetings face to face might be a good idea. After that it should be 80% of videomeetings.
In a Meeting	Agenda as a very short list. Memorandum is not a novel. Manage during a meeting, NOT afterwards. Make sure that everyone knows what is expected and when. Reward good work done!

 

Please give your comments!

 

Pekka Ylisirniö