The CEO knew he would probably not like the findings from the specialist consultants he'd commissioned to look into efficiency.
The report had arrived in the post that morning,
And he'd left it unopened until lunchtime before he could bear to read it.
Sure enough,
And as he'd expected,
The biggest consumer of his employees' time was meetings.
They were taking well over 50% of the available working hours.
What was even worse,
Though,
Was that 80% of all meetings were internal,
Which meant people were spending little time with customers and suppliers.
It got worse still when he read the last page.
He'd found that he had attended 90% of all the meetings.
So this is why he was so burnt out.
He knew then and there he'd have to become better at delegation.
The Centre of Economics and Business Research reported that office workers spend an average of four hours per week in meetings.
These same workers reported feeling like half that time is completely wasted.
Often people are so fearful of making decisions that a meeting has to be called with all the stakeholders.
Some meetings fail to reach any form of consensus,
And you may find that a follow-on meeting is convened as a result.
Many meetings also fail to run to a set agenda with an agreed format and aim for the outcome.
The answer is not just to stop meetings,
But to change the way they are run.
So breathe in,
And breathe down.
The best way to maximise meeting times is to use a structure for that meeting.
If you don't have an in-house structure,
There are some wonderful methodologies out there.
Just do an internet search on these examples.
Walt Disney's Three Rooms is a great way of working out if an idea has any legs before wasting any more time on it.
Using the bonus Six Hats cuts meeting times in half by using parallel thinking so everyone's mind is pointing in the same direction at the same time.
With a priesthood inquiry,
You use the power of positive thinking so you only look at all the things that are working well,
And see how you can make them work even better.
Irrespective of meeting format,
There's another magical trick that works in all circumstances,
And that's to get everyone breathing together in sync and using their diaphragm for a minute at the start of the meeting.
It costs nothing to try this,
And I guarantee that you'll save more than a minute back in time by doing it.
