Shuttered windows on a sunny day. Does anyone like meetings?
Meetings are the bane of working life. On the list of things most conducive to office cheer, they rank some way lower than the fire drill, which at least has the arguable function of saving lives.
Meetings, however, unlike fire drills, consume around 20 per cent of the average business’s budget. It’s a situation only partially down to overpriced custard creams.
The productivity guru Merlin Mann, whose ‘Broken Meetings’ talk has become an Internet sensation, is emphatic that office meetings can be a time-sap. He tells the anecdote of a company IT officer, who held a four-hour conference call with a 30-strong engineering department. This equates to 120 working hours, which presumably would have been more wisely spent doing 120 hours of work.
Nobody stands to benefit from such meetings. The workers do not benefit: they have just spent four hours staring into the abyss. The IT officer does not benefit: he has erected a huge wedge of resentment between himself and his team. And for the company itself, the situation is dire.
“Your company will stand or fall based upon how much the individual people care about what’s happening,” says Mann. “Meetings are a way to sap that spirit.”
The latest study to emerge in the field was published in March 2010. A team at Texas A&M University, led by Nicholas Kohn, took a look at group brainstorming sessions. They found that such meetings may actually impede creativity. “Fixation to other people’s ideas can occur unconsciously,” said Kohn, in the journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology, “and lead to you suggesting ideas that mimic your brainstorming partners.”
Another study, from 2005, was even more disparaging. Alexandra Luong and Steven Rogelberg came to the conclusion that “despite the fact that meetings may help to achieve work-related goals, having too many meetings and spending too much time in meetings per day may have negative effects on the individual.”
It would perhaps be too glib to make the strong claim that meetings need not exist at all. “Some people need to conduct more meetings, not fewer,” says management trainer Beverley Stone, a founder member of the Association of Business Psychologists. “If they let their team carry on regardless, everybody ignores the real issues.”
Do meetings take the biscuit?
From Stone’s experience, when meetings fail it is generally down to an unhealthy group dynamic. She suggests that it is easy for a culture of intimidation to arise, whereby the more dominant participants monopolise the discussion and their quieter colleagues are cowed into keeping schtum.
Rather than trying to eradicate meetings, the more obvious solution would simply be to make them more time-efficient. In 1992, researchers from Middle Tennessee State University sent out questionnaires in a bid to find out what enabled ‘meeting effectiveness’.
They concluded that a good meeting will have:
“clear, well defined goals; timely and efficient action on decision; active participation, full exploration of decision consequences, exploration of a variety of options; commitment of time and effort to the meeting; agenda integrity; meetings that begin on time; comfortable feeling about working with group members in the future; and more satisfaction than frustration derived from the meeting.”
If such suggestions seem geared more towards cushioning the blow of meetings than hammering home the positives, it is perhaps important to examine what makes meetings such a pain in the first place.
The essayist and programmer Paul Graham has an intriguing suggestion. For him, it comes down to a fundamental split between the ways managers and what he calls ‘makers’ envisage their time.
Managers live their lives by the sort of schedule which is carved by Outlook into discrete hour-long blocks. “When you use time that way,” writes Graham, “it’s merely a practical problem to meet with someone. Find an open slot in your schedule, book them, and you’re done.”
For ‘makers’, by contrast – anyone who is being paid to be productive – an hour block is barely long enough to get their teeth into a problem, let alone to ruminate, digest it, and cough up a creative solution. Graham claims that one hour-long meeting, through virtue of a ‘cascading effect’, “can sometimes affect a whole day”.
Might meetings actually impede creativity?
Meetings as we know them may be on their way out. The advent of Skype and similar videoconferencing technologies would seem to herald a brave new world in which you can eat your custard creams, and fume at your manager’s incompetence, from the comfort of your own desk. But in another sense, the managerial culture that spawned meetings is ingrained and hard to shift. Your best call as an employee may simply be to take control of what you can.
Merlin Mann suggests asking specific questions beforehand to keep your manager accountable; or volunteering to write the agenda or the minutes. Paul Graham proposes, in the interests of extending ‘maker’s time’, clustering meetings towards the end of the working day.
In the meantime, if you are suffering from a bad bout of what the Dutch call ‘vergaderziekte’ – meeting sickness – it is reassuring to think that there are steps that can be taken towards a cure.
Kohn, N., & Smith, S. (2010). Collaborative fixation: Effects of others’ ideas on brainstorming Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1699
Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. (2005). Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9 (1), 58-67 DOI: 10.1037/1089-2699.9.1.58
Nixon, C., & Littlepage, G. (1992). Impact of meeting procedures on meeting effectiveness Journal of Business and Psychology, 6 (3), 361-369 DOI: 10.1007/BF01126771
Images: courtesy of Caro Wallis, MoseleyExchange, sunny_J (Flickr)
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