Bet Your Paycheck on Your Next Meeting |
Odds are that you and I have something in common. No, it’s not that we both enjoying watching the Dog the Bounty Hunter television show. We are in a lot of meetings. Based on some quick internet research, surveys say workers spend between 5.6 and 23 hours a week in meetings on average. The data tells us that middle managers and executives are often on the higher end of this range. Apparently, they didn’t survey many sales or professional services people because I think the averages might be even higher. So, for the sake of simplicity (and easy math), let’s say that we spend 10 hours a week in meetings. Sound reasonable?
Now, let’s apply a qualitative measure to meetings. How productive are the meetings you attend? Recently, we performed an informal poll asking, “How often are the meetings you attend productive?” The results were that 79% responded that meetings are sometimes or never productive. Conversely, only 21% said that meetings are usually or always productive. This data is consistent with other studies. For example, in 2005 Microsoft surveyed 38,000 people on productivity and found that 69% feel that meetings aren’t productive.
Simple math tells us that if 70% of meetings aren’t productive and we’re in at least 10 hours per week then we are wasting about 7 hours a week in meetings. Even if you can only improve half of the bad meetings, the improvement would give you over 4.5 WEEKS of time back. How cool would it be to get 4.5 weeks of time back? How important would this time to be to your company especially if there are 100’s or 1,000’s like you? We aren’t even talking about the positive impact of better meeting results (e.g., saving money, increasing sales, improving quality).
Money Meetings
Personally, I’ve observed that meetings generally fall into two camps; meetings tied directly to money and meetings that aren’t. Money meetings include examples like sales calls, funding requests, and meetings that are run by external service providers (e.g., consultants, vendors). For example, when you hire a high paid outside consultant to run a project for your company, all the meetings run by that consultant are now tied directly to money. The consultant knows that they are being evaluated on every meeting. She may not get paid if she doesn’t deliver because she knows clients are unlikely to tolerate a high-paid consultant that wastes their time. The attendees know the company is paying that consultant and they don’t want to waste money spent on the consultant. Therefore, they interact and participate more effectively.
Non-Money Meetings
Meetings that aren’t tied to money are usually meetings that are internal to a company. I suspect that these non-money meetings make up the bulk of your meetings. These meetings aren’t directly tied to closing a sale, and there isn’t a huge expense decision that impacts the company’s bottom line. These non-money meetings are still very important to the business; however, their link to money is indirect. For example, a customer support team holds a weekly status meeting. The team discusses call volumes, response rates, vacation coverage plans, and recent trends. These meetings are important and are critical for managing performance. Unfortunately, non-money meetings often turn into administrative, mundane, and routine exercises.
To illustrate the difference between money and non-money meetings, let’s slightly change the circumstances of the non-money example above and guess what would occur. Let’s say we told the meeting owner and the attendees that if, during the meeting, they could come up with one idea that would result in significantly reducing the number of support calls that we’d give them $1,000 cash each. Do you think the meeting agenda would change? Would everyone prepare more for that meeting? Would the meeting be more productive? You’re darn right that all these things would happen. It might even break out into downright fun. Based on my experience, regular non-money meetings focus 70 - 80% of the time on reporting past performance and discussing administrative issues at length. These are generally “easy” issues that don’t require much discussion. That only leaves 20 – 30% of the meeting to discuss the important issues like analyzing recent trends and determining how to prevent them from occurring in the first place. In other words, there isn’t much discussion focused on solving issues and generating ideas that produce tangible results. These are the “harder” discussions that might even include some conflict. Without motivation (money in this illustration), meetings move away from the hard and towards the easy. However, when there is money on the line, people are willing to take the steps to address those harder, conflict filled issues.
Make Meetings Productive
Am I proposing that we put a cash bounty on meeting results? No! Although, our friend, Dog the Bounty Hunter, might be argue with that we should. The attendees are already getting paid to do their job. Hopefully, they are motivated by performance incentives. What I am proposing is that those of us leading organizations and meetings need to change our approach and try to get the most out of those meetings. We need to demand that meetings have a purpose and that meetings focus solely on that purpose. Simply, I recommend answering two questions about every meeting:
Clear, Results-Focused Purpose
Before you even plan a meeting, it’s critical to clearly understand why you are having the meeting. You are going to make a lot of decisions (e.g., agenda, attendees) based on this purpose, so getting it right is fundamental. If you can answer yes to these questions, you’ve at least got the basics of a good meeting purpose:
Bet My Next Paycheck – The Money Test Assume that your next paycheck is riding on your next meeting achieving its stated purpose. To clarify, if you perform great in the meeting and the meeting still fails to deliver on the purpose, you don’t get your next paycheck. It’s all about results! For any role that you play in a meeting, focus your preparation and participation to achieve its purpose. If you are the owner, this will make you plan better. You’ll put the most important items first on the agenda. Get rid of administrative non-sense that just gets in the way. It will drive you to get materials out in advance and even prod others to think about the meeting in advance. If you are an attendee, it will force you to understand the purpose before the meeting and clarify what’s expected of you in the meeting. Most likely, you’ll prepare more and have a few ideas before the meeting begins. This article is intended to illustrate how the right motivation can drive people to run meetings better. You can substitute career advancement, a worthy cause, urgency, etc. to help motivate yourself or others, it’s just easy to use money as an example. In this article, I’ve only used business oriented examples, but this concept applies to all meetings. We’ve all been in school, church, and charity meetings that could use these concepts. One question before you go, would you bet your paycheck on the results of your next meeting? LeadVantage is a management consulting firm in Chicago. We are experts at helping organizations and managers handle change. We offer experienced business people that can help you by running projects, improving processes, building organizations and developing managers. Contact us today! |
