Bad Meetings Make Bad Companies


DepositphotoBad_Meetings_Make_Bad_Compnaiess_25083497_s11 Signs Your Meetings are Bad

Al Pittampalli, author of the bestseller Read This Before Our Next Meeting, looks at meetings as the lifeblood of an organization.

In an interview with NPR he said, “They’re a place there we make the most important decisions, express the most important messages, the most important communications on the most important matters of the day.”

 But meetings can also be a “weapon of mass interruption.”  

Bad meetings waste time and resources. But furthermore, bad meetings can lead to bad company culture and bad output.  Bryan Stockton, CEO at Mattel witnessed stagnation and loses in the company’s business.   In part, he blamed bad meetings that lead to a lack in innovative culture.

A meeting, where the people of an organization gather to talk about all the important things, is more then a tool to get things done in business. It’s a place where an organization’s culture perpetuates itself.  Meeting consultant, William R Daniels says, “So if every day we go to boring meetings full of boring people, then we can’t help but think that this is a boring company. Bad meetings are a source of negative feelings about our company and ourselves.”

Don’t let your meeting culture lead your business down the wrong path.

Here are a few signs that your meeting culture is in trouble. 

People are always running late. Running-Late

Photo by: Patrick Emerson

If people know your meetings are important and productive, they are generally on time.  There are times when a true emergency or incident will make them late and that’s ok.  But if people are always walking in late to meetings at your office, you have a problem.

They don’t view meetings as important.  

Every meeting should be important or it shouldn’t be held. 

*Please note that if you are having conference calls or web meetings and people are always late, there may be an access issue.  When it’s too difficult to attend, you have a different problem and you might need a new web conferencing solution.

No one is prepared.

No one is PreparedPhoto by: *maya*

Do you find yourself in meetings not even knowing why you are there?  Then, once you figure that out, you’re not really prepared to discuss the topic because you didn’t have the opportunity to do any research. 

Organizations with healthy cultures make meeting preparation a priority.    We’ve written on this topic in depth, so I won’t go into it here.  I’ll just say sharping objectives, creating agendas and assigning roles before every meeting is necessary for effective use of time.

Meetings are long.

meetings are too long

photo by: ransomtech

Sure some meetings need to be an hour long or maybe even more, but those are not the meetings I’m talking about.  I’m talking about the long, drawn out meetings that never seem to go anywhere. Meeting leaders should really think about how long it will take to work through the agenda.   A 15 minute meeting can be more productive then an hour long meeting.   

When planning a meeting remember Parkinson’s law – The amount of time that one has to perform a task is the amount of time it will take to complete the task.  Experiment with this.  For one week make every meeting you have half as long as you normally would.  If the studies are right, you’ll be getting twice as much done in half the time.

Participants are multitasking. 

multitasking

There is some evidence that doodling can help some people concentrate on the task at hand, but any other form of multitasking is unacceptable.

Technology – phones, tablets, laptops, e-mail programs – should be put away, unless they are being used to achieve the objective at hand.   If people are multitasking in your meeting, you are probably running a bad meeting.   It also shows that participants don’t take meetings seriously. This is a bad sign.

No one takes notes.

take-notesPhoto By: Daniel Foster

There is no way, you’ll remember everything that happens at a meeting.  Unless you’re some kind of savant, your brain just can’t handle it.   Every meeting should have an official note taker.  Someone who is familiar with the objective and can create a document everyone can refer to before the next meeting. 

As a meeting participant, you should be taking your own notes.  Write down to-do items or important bits you may need to hold up your end.

Too many presentations. 

too-many-presentationsPhoto by: Daniel Hennemand

LinkedIn reported that they have essentially eliminated the presentation.   Instead they send out the presentation materials before the meeting.  Then they provide 5-10 minutes at the beginning of the meeting for participants to read through the deck to refresh their memory or admittedly, maybe read it for the first time.  

This turns what might have been a 40-minute presentation into a 10-minute activity.   This strategy might not be for everyone but if every meeting starts with a long-winded conversation, you may have a meeting problem.

But I digress.

digressPhoto by: Ewan Munro

Constant wandering off topic is a bad meeting habit.  Sometimes digression fuels creativity so the challenge here is knowing when going off topic is helpful and when it’s wasteful.  There are a few strategies that may help.  

One involves implementing a “Parking Lot” or “Pin Board”.  When a topic that is not on the agenda arises, the leader stops the discussion and places the topic in the Parking Lot or “puts a pin in it”.   There should be a process of revisiting the Parking Lot so these issues don’t fall into a black hole.

All talk and no action. 

All-TalkPhoto by: MTSOfan 

Most meetings end with decisions made.  Few meetings end with a plan of action.

Often times people leave meetings with different ideas of what’s suppose to happen next.  When decisions are not converted into actions, you have a bad meeting.

At the end of every agenda should be time to review the to-do list, assign action and set expectations.   This all goes back to taking notes. The official note taker should also take down and disseminate the action items after the meeting.

Lack of trust.

No-TrustPhoto by: Michael Kuhn

When co-workers don’t trust one another, they tend to shy away from conflict.  Fear of conflict leads to lack of candor.  Without the whole truth and nothing but the truth business decisions can be faulty. 

Healthy organizations breed conflict in a way that is not harmful to individuals.   Disagreements bring forth the real issue.  Once the real issue is brought out in to the open, it can easily be solved.  

With trust, conflict can be a positive thing.

There’s not enough information.

needs-more-informationPhoto by: David Goehring

Do you ever put off making decisions in a meeting because you didn’t have the proper information? 

This issue goes back to preparation.  With a sharp objective and great agenda, you are more likely to ensure the information you need is available.  But there are those times when something unexpected leads you with the need for more information.  

It’s 2015 and we do live in the age of information.  Odds are you can think of a way to ensure that most information will be close at hand when you need it.  Maybe that’s a networked laptop in all your meeting rooms.

No one ever talks about meeting process. 

no-one-talksPhoto by: Craig Sunter – Thanx 2 Million ;-))

Organizations that consistently create successful meetings don’t do it by accident.

Like anything else in life, the goal to have good meetings needs a commitment.  And that means talking about it. 

That means testing strategies and looking for ways to improve. That means measuring success by rating meetings and acknowledging failures by identifying what went wrong and making plans to fix it.     

So how does your meeting culture add up?

Need a little help?

Start by making sure you have the right conferencing solution with a Free Conference Consultation from TEAMINGS.

 

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