Bad habits in meetings – which ones are you guilty of?

In the first of a two-part series in this excerpt from his book, Smart Teams: How to Work Better Together, author and productivity thought leader Dermot Crowley explains why a poor approach to meetings is a sign of other cultural shortfalls within a firm.  

Meetings are a common way in which we cooperate together – but, oh boy, do they take up our time!

Many of my senior clients spend most of their week in meetings, while middle managers and other staff can spend as much as two days a week in these sessions. This can be a huge drain on productivity, especially if the meetings are not well organised.

The sad fact is that too many of our meetings are unnecessary, take too much time and are poorly planned. If we want to create a culture that supports productivity, we need to have fewer meetings. I don’t imagine that any reader would disagree with this, especially if at a senior level, where meetings can take up to 90 per cent of an executive’s day.

The three key problems with our dysfunctional meeting culture are:

1. Too much time spent in meetings.

2. Too many ‘fuzzy’ meetings that are poorly planned with no clearly stated outcomes.

3. Poor meeting behaviours that cause productivity friction.

1. Too much time in meetings

In a coaching session with a senior client recently, we sat in front of his calendar to find a good time to plan a critical new project. I knew we would be hard pressed to find any available time over the coming couple of weeks. But as we scrolled through week after week of back-to-back meetings, double-booked meetings, all-day meetings and recurring meetings, I realised just how bad this problem was.

He needed to flip forward eight weeks before he could find a three-hour timeslot to schedule the project planning session. This executive is not alone. His situation is extreme, certainly, but is becoming more and more the norm. Our days are being taken over by endless meetings.

If we spend too much of our time trapped in meetings our balance goes out of whack. Senior executives still have other priorities, things they must get done outside of meetings, but they leave themselves no time to do them. They are stuck in meetings from 9am to 5pm, then spend from 5pm to 9pm catching up on their other work and checking emails. Under such pressure, the quality of their work suffers.

While this problem may not be so extreme at more junior levels, many of us spend a lot of our time in meetings, and too much of that time is used less than effectively. There is no balance in the schedule, which leads to long working hours, increased stress and growing frustration.

2. Poorly planned and poorly run meetings

One of the negative impacts of being so busy is we don’t have the time or the headspace to properly plan the meetings we organise or attend. This leads to wasted time in the meeting and the risk that it will not achieve a clear outcome.

Many of us plan the meeting in the meeting. We turn up and say, ‘Okay, what are we here to talk about?’

Of course, many meetings – especially the more formal ones – are planned well, with all participants ensuring they are prepared. But less formal and structured meetings without a clear purpose or agenda are at greater risk of meandering unproductively.

3. Poor meeting behaviours

One day, as I was waiting for a workshop to start in one of my professional services client firms, the HR manager who organised the training gave me a heads-up that some people were likely to arrive late.

She explained that they operated at a different ‘pace’ from most organisations, and that people often arrived a few minutes late to internal meetings. I braced myself for a couple of latecomers. The reality was much worse than I had anticipated.

Out of 19 participants, just two arrived on time. The rest dribbled in over a period of 15 minutes after the session was to have started. Not one person apologised for being late. This way of operating had been normalised for them, and they did not see it as a problem. It was shocking to me, and spoke volumes about the culture of the organisation. I was sure that if I followed the senior leadership team around for a week, I would see them displaying the same disrespect for other people’s time.

When I discussed this at the break with the HR person, she admitted it was a big problem, but she assured me it would never happen at client meetings – only internal ones. So it seems that they were happy to respect time when there was a sale on the line, but not if it was just for the benefit of the team. This suggests that they set no value on their colleagues’ time. And the behaviour was perpetuated because there were no consequences.

This was such a good example of poor meeting behaviour that had become normalised across the team. The culture of an organisation is shaped by behaviour like this.

But it is not the only poor meeting behaviour. Spot the behaviours that are common in your workplace among the following:

• stepping in and out of the room to take calls during the meeting;
• doing emails instead of being attentive;
• staying quiet in the meeting, but raising issues afterwards;
• dominating the discussion unreasonably;
• dismissing the points of view of others;
• having side-conversations when someone is talking;
• hijacking the agenda.

Which poor meeting behaviours are you guilty of?

[The second part of this series examines how firms can realistically seek to reduce the number of meetings it holds by 25 per cent.]

Dermot Crowley is a productivity thought leader, author, speaker and trainer. He works with leaders, executives and professionals in many of Australia’s leading organisations, helping to boost the productivity of their people and teams. For more information, visit www.dermotcrowley.com.au or email dermot.crowley@adapttraining.com.au.