Meaningless Meetings by Szymon Janiak

The post was originally published in Polish on Szymon’s LinkedIn profile. Szymon kindly agreed to republish what we think is of great value to our readers.

A plague of meaningless meetings ruins your days. It’s funny because companies outdo compete in measuring the effectiveness of their employees. They do research on remote work, the best hours for effectiveness, the environment at work, etc. This way, they want to achieve at least slightly better results–3, 5, 7%. Meanwhile, they still have it in their culture to organize idiotic meetings that last hours, little comes out of them, and at the same time they are the biggest problem, because they waste time irretrievably.

Many went through it. In various companies, I myself sat for years at meetings that seemed to have no end, and their content was devoid of specifics. Each meeting brought more hours filled with generalities, discussions about nothing, and formalities that were only to cover up the lack of real decisions. Digression after digression. Hundreds of unnecessary anecdotes. Most of them could be done by e-mail and much more effectively.

What’s more, I often observed that someone was sitting with the camera and microphone turned off and in practice it turned out that they were just doing something else. As a result, not only did they not get anything out of this meeting, but they were also less effective in what they could have been doing on their own with full concentration. Well, but they needed to be at that meeting because they got an invitation from the superior.

I’m not saying to reject meetings altogether–they are indeed necessary. But they must be effective, specific, and mostly brief. If your meetings last ages and end with empty words, it means that the company’s communication system is failing.

What works for me?

• Reduce the meeting time to a minimum–get straight to the point
• Define a very specific goal for the meeting: Before agreeing, ask about the agenda–don’t be afraid to question and disagree.
• Limit the number of participants: Only invite those who really have something to bring to the table.
• Suggest alternatives: Consider whether the issue requires an actual appointment and whether it can be handled differently
• Evaluate effectiveness regularly: After each meeting, think about what could have been done better and whether it was really necessary.

The comment section had to add:

I recommend the simplest solution, I implemented it and it works. 90% of meetings in the room are standing, without coffee, sitting down, and wasting time. Thus they become specific and to the point.

– Kamil Sakałus, Managing Director at Tatry Wysokie

Losing time is one thing, losing faith in our organization, its sense and agency (if we didn’t ‘manage’ anything at our meeting), – that’s another matter.

A meeting is like an operation, we pick only the necessary doctors and tools, – the less the better.

– Zbigniew Stężyński, Business Development Director at Multipay

I believe there’s one very important thing to add that was missing from the list: Before the meeting, determine how you will assess whether the goal of the meeting has been achieved. Measure it every time, and then look at what these measurements reveal.

Without this, other requirements look like a kind of magic: the meeting can be long if the situation requires. Meetings can always be face to face if they are more efficient this way, so you don’t have to introduce alternatives at all. And so on. Just make sure that each meeting, regardless of its duration, form (online/offline), frequency, – has clear metrics of whether the goal was achieved or less than. This is where it begins, this is where it ends. Otherwise, as soon as the fashionable term ‘meeting’ pops up, people will BY DEFAULT, often thoughtlessly, limit the number of meetings, instead of focusing on the real problem – lack of metrics for having achieved the goal successfully.

– Przemyslaw Soroka, Partner at SH Advisory