What is the one thing that wastes most of your time at work?
You might have said ‘emails’, you might even have said ‘that annoying colleague who always hangs around my desk’, but most likely you will have said ‘meetings’.
That is because most employees face meetings overload in their workplace, and arguably it is worst for executives who (according to the Harvard Business Review) spend an average of nearly 23 hours per week in meetings.
But crazy meeting schedules impact everyone in an organisation, and bad meetings are not just wasting people’s time, they are also losing money. Professor Steven Rogelberg conducted research showing that for a company of 5000+ employees, time misspent in meetings equated to around $25,000 per employee annually; that’s over $100 million per year in large companies.
So why do we have so many unproductive and ineffective meetings?
The Secret (Or Common Sense) Behind Running Effective Meetings
The problem is that most meetings just exist. Someone set them up, way back in the distant past, they entered a schedule and then people just attend them. No one stops to ask the right questions; those that will ensure a good meeting.