On the pointlessness of meetings

I think that probably 80% of the meetings that I have ever attended have been a complete waste of time, time that could have been better spent on more value-adding activities.

There are so many dysfunctionalities with meetings that is is easy to list quite a few:

• Often meetings are held simply because they have been scheduled and thus represent a rigid mindset. Since they are going to be held regardless, they often end up being discussions of trivia.
• No agenda is circulated ahead of time or if an agenda is circulated the item titles are so brief as to give no clue as to what the item is actually about so that participants cannot do any preparation or prior investigation.
• Meetings tend to be dominated by either the senior person present or the loudest, rudest or most opinionated person present neither of whom may have the best ideas or the most worthwhile things to say.
• They may be held to give the appearance of consultation when regardless of what is said the manager who called it is still going to do what they always intended to do.
• The timing of the meeting may take no account of more urgent priorities of participants.
• They may be held so frequently that there is no room for items from one meeting to be progressed before the next is held.
• They may be used to convey information which could more quickly and accurately be disseminated by other means.

In Meeting Analysis: Findings from Research and Practice, a meta-analysis of more than 100 research papers on meetings, Romano & Nunamaker concluded that:

...several decades of studies reveal meetings are indeed very costly in both terms money and time. Studies also reveal that in general meetings are unproductive and wasteful. Studies find that meetings suffer from a myriad of problems, making managers and workers alike dissatisfied with the process and the outcomes in many cases.

And recent research (see Further reading below) has shown that unless they are exceptionally well-prepared, well-run and properly targeted they are simply a waste of time.

Jason Fried in his book Rework has gone so far as to conclude that meetings are toxic. In the following video presentation, he discusses how meetings and other interruptions at work have a deadly effect on productivity:




Given all of this research by literally hundreds of researchers it is hard to understand why managers continue to have lots of meetings since clearly they are for the most part unproductive.

Given that such meetings actually undermine the organisation, perhaps the simplest solution would be for managers to put their money where their mouth is: actually charge managers a cost against their salaries for every meeting they hold and for every person present and for every hours duration. While it sounds like a drastic solution, it would soon get managers thinking about how essential a meeting was, how to make them short, focused and effective and what better alternatives existed.

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Further reading

Want to Improve Productivity? Scrap meetings Ray Williams (Psychology Today)

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