Work means meetings
Work means meetings. It means meeting with any combination of your team-mates; your manager and colleagues from other departments (developers, designers, project managers, strategists, architects, builders... you name them, they want to talk to you).If I had a dollar (or a pound, or a Euro) for each time I've heard "Can I get 30 minutes of your time?" then I'd be a very wealthy man. If I included times when I've been given a cold call or an unsolicited email from a supplier asking to get on my calendar, I'd be extremely wealthy!
Which brings me to the point: how much do you and your leadership value your working time?
How good are your meetings?
Let's suppose I'm paid $60 per hour. Nice, right? But it will work for the numbers - I get paid $1 per minute to do my job. To sell more stuff. To design more stuff, or to develop more stuff. My job description says sell/design/develop/build stuff, and I get paid $1 per minute to do that.
But if I get dragged away from my role to attend a meeting, then I have to hope that the meeting I'm attending will be worth the time I'm spending not doing my normal role (unless that meeting is actually part of the design/build/sell activity I normally do).
So I get pulled onto a call for all the managers in my department. It's a 30-minute call. Sadly, it's not actually relevant to my role, so the business is paying me to do something that's not part of my actual role. In fact, it doesn't apply to about 20 of the 40 managers in the meeting, and they're all getting paid the same as me.
20 managers. $1 per minute, per manager. 30 minutes? Total cost: $600.
For a meeting that lasts 30 minutes. Now imagine that it lasts an hour; now it's costing the business $1200. It's an hour that could have been spent building/selling or whatever. But why did it happen? Because leadership determined that it was more important for you to hear what they said instead of doing what you normally do.
Now imagine it's an 'all hands on deck' meeting. Or a 'strategic communications' presentation, and you invite 100 managers, and it lasts 30 minutes. It needs to span the entire business strategy to be relevant to everybody; for each manager that it doesn't apply to, that's $30 at risk, and if it isn't relevant to any of them (or if it's a repeat of last month's meeting) then that's $3000 at risk.
So what do you do?
When you call a meeting with an individual, you're pulling them away from their normal role to meet with you. You know the job you hired them to do? You're now preventing them from doing it.Or perhaps you're arranging a meeting with your full team - of managers, who get paid $60 per hour - you need to make absolutely certain that the meeting you're hosting is going to be at least as valuable to them (and to the business) as their normal work.
And if it isn't? In that case, there's definitely a strong argument for an asynchronous communication method. Email... Teams chat... Video plus transcript... it's your choice, but it gives your team the choice of when to consume the content.
"But," you say, "The content is so important I need to be sure they've consumed it!"
If you can say that for sure, then it's definitely time to hold a meeting. However, as a gentle suggestion, please make sure that you're not confusing 'the content' with 'my opinion'.
But why aren't your attendees participating? Are you just talking for 30 (or 60) minutes? You've been hired to lead, support and manage - not to perform a 30-minute monologue to a tough audience of colleagues who are finding your material irrelevant and uninteresting. If you have eight people on your team, and you pull them out of their work for an hour to attend your meeting, you have cost the business the equivalent of one full day of work.
Or imagine you call a meeting for 40 people, for an hour. You've just taken the equivalent of one week's work out of the business, no matter how much that costs.
Consider this: if your organization is so large that you invite 400 people, and they all turn up at 8:00 am sharp for your meeting, and you don't start until 8:05 am, then that's the equivalent of over four days of work that you've wasted.
And if your content doesn't apply to a quarter of that audience, and your meeting lasts for an hour, then 100 hours of work got stuck in a meeting it didn't want to be in, when it could have been doing its job.
So, what should you do?
Make your agenda more inclusive.
If you're inviting everybody, then make sure your message applies to all of them. Talk to the builders, the designers, the developers, the sellers. Talk to the team that sells over the phone. Include the team that manages the stores.If you can't be more inclusive with your agenda, then be more selective with your audience.
Do you typically invite all the managers in your department? Look at the agenda, look at who you're inviting: do they match?If you have a guest speaker, ask them to fully introduce themselves; to explain what they do, and to explain why it's relevant to the audience. Context over content, this time.
Think about it: the more people you invite to a meeting, the more you're costing the business and the harder you're going to have to work to be relevant to everybody. It's worth the effort, but make sure you're actually putting the effort in.
Other topics I've posted on that may be of interest to you:
Project Management: A Trip To the Moon (when meetings go wrong)
Team-building exercises with Remote Workers
