No company can afford bad meetings in times of home office and four-day workweeks. Experts advise: radically clean out, measure the quality of meetings – and politely cancel if necessary.
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Unproductive meetings are like unhealthy eating: everyone is aware of the damage in theory, but little is changed. Bad meetings are not just a waste of time, says Oliver Mattmann, managing director of Peter Beglinger Training AG in Zug, Switzerland. “Unproductive and unnecessary meetings also damage the company culture,” he warns. If stagnation is accepted, it demotivates employees and managers alike.
Obviously unnecessary meetings are not just slowing down young employees of Generation Z. “Older people are also bothered by too many, useless or unnecessary meetings. This picture is independent of age,” Mattmann emphasizes. And the situation is getting worse, if only because of one simple fact. “We have less and less working time available to produce results,” says the Swiss, whose father used to work 55 hours a week and only had two weeks’ vacation a year.
This makes it all the more important to radically clear out the meeting calendar. Purely informational events can be cancelled immediately without replacement, says Stephan Höfer, Professor of Production Organization and Quality Management at the ESB Business School at Reutlingen University. He and Mattmann wrote the guidebook “Becoming a Meeting Champion in 7 Steps: A Business Novel.”
Tips for good meetings
As different as companies are depending on their size and industry, experts believe there are some basic requirements that meetings must always meet:
- No meeting begins without an agenda, minutes and objectives. “90 percent of meeting success is preparation,” say the authors.
- All documents must be sent to the participants at least three working days in advance.
- Do not tolerate meeting tourists – only people who will specifically contribute something to the meeting or who will moderate it will be invited.
- Anyone who cannot consistently avoid interruptions (telephone, computer) should stay away from the meeting.
- Points like “Miscellaneous, Other, Miscellaneous” have no place on the agenda. “It’s just a dumping ground for unprepared topics anyway,” say Höfer and Mattmann.
- Every meeting ends with a concrete agreement. Minimum requirement: Who does what and by when?
Sounds simple. But why is it so difficult to implement in practice? There is clearly still a lack of awareness of the problem. , which Mattmann’s company recently carried out for the umbrella organization of the Swiss economy, Economiesuisse. One in four of the 532 respondents stated that the meeting culture in the company is never questioned. Only eleven percent considered at least once a month how meetings could be run better.
The survey also suggests that most meetings are one-off and ad hoc. According to the authors, it is worthwhile to establish a fixed format for such topics. “Our experience shows that regular and recurring meetings are much easier to optimize,” they say. According to the experts, the maxim is: short and more frequent: “So it is better to spend 15 minutes a day as a team discussing tasks and goals, rather than spending 120 minutes in the meeting room every two weeks and still not making any progress.”
Measuring the success of meetings
According to Höfer and Mattmann, how successful a meeting really is can be measured. One method is the “MEGA” value (Meeting Goal Achievement). Participants are asked whether they believe the goal of the meeting was achieved. They can only give 0 or 100 percent. The average value gives a clear picture of how successful the meeting was. The experts suggest that the most important meetings (around 20 percent of all meetings) be checked for quality in this way. One goal could be to increase the “MEGA” value by 25 percent within three months.
Good meetings are not just a task for the person inviting them. Mattmann and Höfer offer these tips for a good meeting culture:
- Each participant feels responsible for achieving the goal of the meeting faster and with better quality.
- At the end of each meeting the question is asked: What can we immediately change and improve at the next meeting?
- A fixed period of time is reserved for better meeting culture within the team, for example half a day every month.
- “Be consistent: Do not accept invitations to meetings that lack an agenda, objectives and minutes,” say the authors.
Ultimately, however, it is the managers who are the deciding factor for better meetings. “If management sets an example of a ‘sloppy’ meeting culture, this will spread throughout the company,” warns Mattmann. He believes that even many top managers are poor at moderating meetings. Nevertheless, further training in this area is still massively neglected. However, further training can help to sustain hard-earned successes in meeting culture. “This is not a sure-fire success, but a management task,” emphasizes the trainer.
Source: Stern
