Meetings can serve many different purposes. Informational meetings share news with staff. Educational meetings teach employees something new. Discussion meetings provide a forum for employees to give their opinions, brainstorm together, and find solutions to problems and ideas for new projects and ventures. Planning meetings focus staff attention on critical goals and energize employees.
Whatever their intent, the key to success is how well the meetings are managed.
The Bad Side of Meetings
Too many of the meetings we attend don’t accomplish what they set out to do. They seem to fit the jokes made about meetings. “A meeting is a place where people take minutes and waste hours,” or, “A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing and who jointly decide that nothing can be done,” or the old rubric, “A camel is a horse designed by a committee.” Further, they swallow up valuable time and energy. Today, meetings take up as much as 30 percent of our work week. Senior management can spend almost 50 percent of their week in meetings.
Too often, meetings are held unnecessarily. There is no point in calling a meeting if you can accomplish the same goal on your own. If you need information from another person, you can get that information via telephone, on e-mail, or over lunch. It’s even possible to talk to a group in a virtual environment. Meetings make sense when you believe that several people in the same room can come up with a new solution to a recurring problem or when you want the individuals’ support to implement a new policy or procedure or otherwise change operations.