On How to Have Fewer Bad Meetings

This Week’s Topic: The Meeting Audit

1 Strategy 🎯 

As much as we love to complain about meetings, they play a vital role in the success of your team.

When done well, bringing team members together in real-time can turbo charge collaboration, decision making, and team connection.

But not all meetings are created equal.

Most meetings are unproductive, and some are flat-out painful.

While it’s easy to write off bad meetings as a cost of doing business, most leaders are blind to the true cost of our bloated calendars.

In addition to the waste of time, we also pay for bad meetings in the form of:

• Opportunity Cost: Our time spent in that bad meeting was time we could have applied to more important tasks.

• Switching Cost: Coming out of a meeting, it takes significant mental resources to re-focus our attention on the task that the meeting pulled us away from in the first place.

And let’s not forget about the dollars and cents.

Several years ago I did a horrible job facilitating a 1-hour meeting with a senior leadership team. Based on the salaries of the attendees, my poorly facilitated 1-hour meeting cost the organization $8,000 in payroll alone.

Make it a monthly meeting and the annual cost jumps to $96,000

Make it a weekly meeting and the annual cost leaps to $416,000!

So, how can you stop bad meetings from stealing your team’s precious time and energy?🤔 

With a Meeting Audit.

A simple, structured approach to help you quantify the value and productivity of the many meetings on your calendar.

Here are the steps 📝

1 List all your recurring meetings

2 For each meeting capture the purpose, duration, # of participants, and frequency

3 Assign a Productivity Score to each meeting (1 = Waste of Time; 5 = Extremely Productive)

4 Calculate the Annual Cost of each meeting using this formula: (duration X # of participants X avg. hourly pay X # of meetings per year)  

5 Calculate the Index using this formula: (annual cost / productivity score)

6 Sort your meetings by Index from lowest to highest (Lower is better)

Click here for a copy of the Meeting Audit template and instructions

To help bring this to life, let’s imagine you’re a short, green Jedi master and your team is wasting too much time in unproductive meetings.

Your Meeting Audit results might look like this:

With your Meeting Audit results in hand, you and your Jedis can have a productive, data-driven conversation around how the team’s time and energy is being spent in meetings.

You’d likely notice that the weekly Jedi Council Strategy sessions are both expensive and unproductive, and you might decide to make one or more of the following changes to improve the Index for that meeting:

• Make the meeting shorter

• Reduce the number of Jedi in the meeting

• Change the cadence

• Make the meeting more productive

• Cancel the meeting series entirely

Remember, every minute saved from unnecessary meetings is a minute gained for more meaningful work - life bringing peace to the galaxy.

Did this week’s topic resonate with you? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know!

Click here for a copy of the Meeting Audit template and instructions.

Want some help fixing your team’s meeting culture? Book a free consultation and let’s talk about it!

See you next Wednesday,

Darin

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