Management, Coaching, Consulting, Project services

  Let me do some math with you. Your weekly cross-team sync: 8 people, 60 minutes. It has been running for 11 months. Attendance is variable. Decisions are inconsistent. The agenda is usually sent the morning of, sometimes not at all. The meeting usually runs 10 to 15 minutes over. Here is what that meeting has actually cost your organization: 8 people × 1.25 hours (with overrun) × 48 weeks = 480 hours of collective human time. That is 12 full working weeks. Three months of one person’s life. At a blended fully-loaded salary of $120,000 for a senior IC or manager, you’re looking at roughly $70,000 in labor cost for a single recurring meeting over a year. Now ask yourself: what has that meeting produced? If it has produced $70,000 in value - in decisions made, alignment created, problems solved, projects unblocked - then it is worth every minute. Many good meetings are. But if it produces vague summaries, unclear follow-up, and decisions that get relitigated in Slack the next day? Y...

Today I would like to discuss about meetings in the work environment. I'm pretty sure that you all have an agenda on your desk or in your computer, filled with lots of meetings every week and month. Are these meetings necessary? All of them? Do you reach your goals with these meetings? Here is one excerpt from a very interesting article: How many meetings did you attend or hold in 2006? Tens? Hundreds? Now, take a minute to consider how many of those meetings were actually turned into positive, productive action that made your business better. These are important questions to ask in a world of ‘fast-food communication’, where ondemand, real-time, dynamic collaboration technologies have quickly turned global business into a single, connected cube farm. Everyone has meetings; it’s up to you to determine whether the information and responsibilities shared in those meetings drives your success, or simply leads to deeper inefficiency. Here is the full article, to which I challenge to di...