Attending internal meetings is a non-value added activity. Imagine providing your customers a line item bill for the services provided by your enterprise that included the time spent in internal meetings. You may be surprised at the percent of the bill allocated to meetings. But it’s unlikely you’d be surprised by how unwilling a customer would be to pay for all of those meetings.
By definition meetings are a waste. As with any waste there are ways to reduce the waste and achieve a corresponding increase in value. The first step in making meetings count is to establish the value of any meeting. This step occurs even before the meeting agenda is developed. Since every meeting has a cost, it should also have a corresponding value, otherwise why have it?
With this one step we may have already eliminated the need for at least one third of all meetings. I’ve seen enterprises require an series of escalating signatures to approve capital expenditures for amounts that are insignificant compared to the cost of a 20 person one hour meeting. Yet literally anyone in the organization could schedule that meeting with no second thoughts. And in fact schedule hundreds of them a year.
When the value of a meeting is justified it is usually for the following reasons:
- Education
- Decision Making
It’s a short list. Note that the majority of meetings held rarely accomplish either.
Education meetings are designed to increase the skills or capabilities of the participants. This type of meeting is not the same as an information sharing meeting; which probably represents the greatest majority of meetings held. Given the vast array of methods available to any enterprise these days, the meeting format is probably the most costly and provides the least value. Either design the meeting to truly educate the participants or shift the content to an email, webinar, text message, blog, voice message, discussion tree, etc.
Decision making meetings are designed to increase the speed of the decision making process. They are an alternative to having a serial review and approval process. Instead all of the decision makers are in the room at the same time. The objective of this type of meeting is to make a yes or no decision; maybe is not an optional outcome of the meeting. However, it is possible to establish a yes decision with conditions that must be later satisfied or the decision automatically reverts to no.
Comments