Meetings are HELL

Einstein stated that nothing can go faster than light. I would like to make my own statement: nothing can go slower than a meeting.

I am talking about internal meetings at a company to discuss work, not meeting customers or friends. Some people who I have worked with may believe that I don't like meetings. Actually, I believe that meetings are very useful, particularly when you want to bring an issue out into the open or get some feedback.

As a researcher, I can always dream up new ideas that I want to experiment with. I don't like meetings that take up my time when there are other things I'd rather be doing.

What's Wrong

There are many types of meeting, the quick one-on-one to chat about a project, brainstorming meetings (usually including the one guy who can't think without saying what he is thinking), status meetings to discuss how the project is coming together and the large group of people coming together because they supposedly have some ill defined common purpose.

Meetings are about people having a discussion. There should be dialogue, not monologue. Too often one person speaks for an extended period of time: that is called a lecture. Why bring together so many people (and spend man-hours) when you could send out the speech in an email ? If you have two people who are arguing about something then everyone else in the room has to wait for them to finish. Have them thrash it out offline.

Some people seem to believe that if they are arranging a meeting they must cook up some slides, using some tired old template, so that everyone can stare at several glaringly obvious pages of text for half an hour. This is probably timed for just after lunch, when everyone is feeling the most sleepy.

One of the key problems is that almost all meetings do not have a chairperson who is bold enough to draw discussion and arguments to a close, or to interrupt someone who is speaking for too long. We think it's rude to stop people from talking or ask them to hurry up and get to the point but we must consider all the other people in the room. Without an effective chairperson the meeting will drag on and on, lose it's sense of purpose until the participants start to lose their will to live.

Mandatory meetings suck the most. When I was at Surrey University, every month I would receive an email saying that if someone from my club didn't go to the sports clubs committee meeting we would have our club bank account frozen. They really knew how to make you not want to go. Besides, most of us had no real power to make a difference. No one wants to listen to someone talk about something that will never be changed, no matter what.

Lyndon's law of meetings says meetings always go on longer than you want, this applies to all meetings, regardless of duration or number of participants.

I understand that in the USA it is considered proper to always try to speak up in meetings. That's fine if the reason is for genuine dialogue but if you only speak because you feel that you should say something then you're part of the problem.

The Solution

Most of these problems can be alleviated if the person who called the meeting takes the responsibility to:
  • Make sure there is an objective for the meeting, for example, agree on something, itemise all high priority issues. Make sure everyone knows this before the meeting. No objective = no reason to have a meeting.
  • Don't use slides unless there is an important diagram, chart or table that you need to refer to.
  • Put a time limit on the meeting and keep to it, move discussion on when it gets stuck (agree a common ground or agree to disagree). Never allow extra items to be tacked onto the end.
  • Stop anyone monopolising the discussion. If your meeting doesn't need discussion from all the attendees then don't have it, send an email!
  • Never make it mandatory to attend, make the meeting worthwhile and tell people why.