Bad Meetings — How to Fix Them

When you scan your calendar for the week or month eyeing the meetings you are scheduled to attend, what thoughts come up? Is it excitement or dread? Appreciation or resentment? Do you anticipate it being a time well spent or another bad meeting that will be a drain on your energy?

If you’re like most people, dread, resentment, and wasted time register faster, and more frequently, than any positive words or feelings when it comes to participating in bad meetings.

Why are office meetings such a negative?

The easy answer is there are too many. They disrupt productive time, and are generally poorly planned and executed. What might be the solution?

In the Harvard Business Review article, “Stop the Meeting Madness”, the authors Perlow, Hadley, and Eun, discuss their findings having researched the meeting styles and components of companies in a variety of sectors. The organizations all seemed to have similar problems and shared the fact they did not have a solution. Many were not aware of the impact and consequences their bad meetings were having on their organizations, teams, and individuals. Nor did they know how to fix things.

The authors described three areas where organizations are vulnerable because of faulty meeting styles and content — group, individual, and group and individual combination. Having to participate in bad meetings impacts comradery and takes away from team and solo productivity. They are often disruptive to deep thinking time because their hours and dates are fluid, changed at the last-minute, thus distracting thought workflow and concentration.

Once people arrive, they find no agenda, or a vague one, and become less involved and easily distracted. Because attendance is generally mandatory (regardless of its relevance to the attendee) being at the meeting becomes more important than doing anything else — regardless of work’s value or urgency. For the individual, attending the sheer number of meetings becomes the focus of the work. This is true at all levels, including senior leaders. Because of this drain on worktime, employees are forced to find time in other areas to complete their assignments. Work quality is compromised and personal time is stolen, affecting work/life balance.

Perlow, Hadley, and Eun suggest a detailed approach to solving this meeting madness problem.

1. Take the emotional pulse of the attendees, individually, with some form of survey or interview process. Ask people how they experience the meetings. What are their needs and expectations? Do they resent anyone or thing in the process? Ask about comradery and thinking time. Dig deep.
2. Interpret the data as a group. What is working and where are the opportunities for individuals and teams? What would make things better? Set a tone that the solution is in the room, and everyone’s experience and voice is welcomed and valid.
3. Set goals, based on the feedback, that the team and every individual will aim towards. Everyone must gain, personally and as a team member, for people to want to comply, participate, or continue. Areas such as adherence to schedule and calendaring meetings on days and at times that do not disrupt important think time; agendas that address the needs of many, efficiency of information distribution prior to the meeting, as well as rules of decorum such as the use of devices during the time together.
4. Setting milestones and monitoring progress. Like any successful program, celebrating achievements and intermittent measures to assess progress needs to take place to assure the team is on the right track, make necessary adjustments and motivate them to continue.
5. Schedule future time to check-in with all members to learn if emotional needs are being met and to determine if results have been attained. Fix what is still broken.

What has been discussed above are simple, but effective, ways of determining why your team’s meeting are so disliked and ineffective. Rather than struggle through more hours with poor results, why not ask the attendees how the meeting is helping them? Inquire as to what they gain and like, and what is not working and why. You may be surprised. What if the complaints mirror what you are feeling? On the other hand, what if it is something that never occurred to you? How easy would that be to fix?

Try it at your next meeting. Suggest it to your supervisor. Discuss it with your colleagues. Reap the benefits.