seen it the length and breadth of the business world, from boardroom to shop floor. And when I see it I ask clients—as I ask you now—to consider the following:
Imagine you are in a role which requires you to attend three hours of meetings a day. And let’s say you’d score those meetings 70 percent effective. Let’s also imagine there are 100 people like you in the company and that your average wage is, say, $100k. None of this is particularly far-fetched, you’d agree? OK, then.
You just wasted 82 days in meetings this year, costing your company a pretty significant $2m. What’s more, if you were to continue at this rate for a conventional career, you’d be burning a total of nine years, six months, and three days of your working life.
This is hypothetical, but far from fantastical. Here’s a real example which I put in front of the board of a major pharmaceutical company who weren’t immediately convinced that ineffective meetings were having a significant effect on their business.
They’d called me in—as clients often do—to get more creativity into their working practices. People often feel this is a kind of spray-on process but quickly discover that the blocks to creativity lie in some very fundamental practicalities.
In the Pharma’s case the numbers were more like 4.5 hours spent in meetings per day, 60 percent effectiveness, average fully loaded costs of $125,000 and 2500 employees. Put them through the formula and there’s an eye-watering 72 million dollars of invaluable time and cost you just poured down the drain.
By any standards that’s a major mistake to be making. And to keep on making.
So yes, it’s a soft issue. But with a rock hard center. It’s like flying through a cloud with a nasty, big mountain hidden inside it. The implications for your financial as well as physical wellbeing can be sudden and drastic.
When I am talking to people who like to differentiate their activities in terms of “hard stuff” and “soft stuff,” I like to describe the work I do particularly with meetings as “the hard-soft stuff.” Soft, in that it’s broadly a people issue. And hard because it’s tough to fix.
When you start to really change meetings, you are tinkering with the culture of the business, and issues don’t come much trickier. It’s easy enough for your business to commit to culture change when you are on a blue-sky-thinking executive-retreat somewhere nice and warm. But visit the workplace a week or two later and you’ll find the “nearly meeting” culture is as stuck as ever. We’ll look at how to change things more effectively a little later in the book.
Nearly Meetings are a worldwide epidemic. And epidemics are something that one of my clients Thomas Breuer knows more than most about. Thomas doesn’t have a golf trophy in his office. Nor one of those toe-curling posters shot against a Hawaiian sunset saying what a real leader is made of.
Thomas Breuer, a physician and epidemiologist by training, is Head of Global Vaccine Development (GVD) at GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines. In the GVD offices there are photographs of African women and their children. They are there to remind all of them of their deadline to license a malaria vaccine and the devastating prospect on mortality in Africa if they fall behind their target. And malaria is just one area of attention. When H1N1 swine flu last threatened the world, it was on Thomas’s watch. It explains why Thomas is intolerant of outdated processes and wasting time.
When Thomas took over his new role, his first act was to have multiple small informal lunches with groups across his entire staff of 1400 people.
What they told me again and again is that we are wasting huge time and money in meetings. The amount of money we were burning in people time in wasteful meetings was mind-blowing. I realized instead of hiring in or outsourcing there was one untapped jewel sitting in the middle of my department and that by doing meetings better I could create more time for people already in the company and who have the skills I need now.
So, how to engage a group of medics and scientists in meetings when they’d all rather be out saving the world from rotavirus, shingles, cancer, and worse? The answer, it turned out, was to stop focusing on meeting efficiency and start thinking about meeting health. We set up a “meeting hospital” and for three months we took in meetings that were sick, needy, and near death and brought them back to life. Quite a few of the techniques in this book were developed in the emergency ward of the meeting hospital.
The results read like one of those “before and after” weight-loss advertisements. After three months 97 percent of participants found meetings more purposeful, clear, and engaging.
Clearly, with the right antidote and a big bucket of innovation we can tackle nearly meetings. But the question is, if they are so manifestly unhealthy, why do we keep having them?
We nearly meet because … in a mad world it makes sense
If I worked every day in some of the companies I visit, I am certain I would be nearly meeting in a week.
When I started working with one of my clients, part of their business had a monthly six-hour conference call involving 100 people around the world. That’s 72 hours a year or nearly two whole working weeks. Multiply that by the number of participants and you are looking at a collective year and a half of working life. It had better be a pretty important subject, wouldn’t you think? But it wasn’t. It was a business-as-usual thing. No one wants to be in that meeting. Certainly not for six hours. But no one feels that they can legitimately not take part. So they sit there, rolling their eyes in various locations around the world, one eye on the BlackBerry, the other on the clock, pretending to meet. In an illogical system, it’s the logical response.
We dealt with this meeting in a way that I strongly recommend you try in your own company. We blew it up. And then we only put back what was absolutely needed. It turned out that the real hot topics could be best showcased in a bimonthly webforum. And the informal information sharing is now done, café style, at the end of the day every six weeks or so.
We nearly meet because … we have lost control of our diaries
I have come to realize that diaries are like houses. It is easy to fill them both with unwanted clutter.
In 2008 the Pearls decided to spend a couple of years living in Italy. When we rented out our house in London we put half the furniture in storage and took the rest with us to Piedmont. On our return we had only 50 percent of our original furniture and the house felt—absolutely fine! Or to put it another way, we had been living with twice as much stuff as we needed but hadn’t noticed because we had got so used to all the clutter around us, we’d stopped seeing it. So, now take a look at your diary and all the meetings in it. Which half needs to go into storage? There will be two kinds of meetings cluttering up your day: Standing meetings and Ad Hoc ones.
Standing meetings are the regular ones which are fixed (daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly) at the beginning of the year and/or project. They are like the furniture, fixtures, and fittings. You don’t necessarily know who gave them to you or why they are there, but they have been around so long you have ceased to notice them; they have become the background to your life. The rest are Ad Hoc meetings. They appear unexpectedly in response to a situation, problem or request. I think of these as impulse buys that you see at the weekend and “must have,” or mail—including junk mail—that arrives in your letterbox clamoring for your attention.
The rules for de-cluttering a house or diary are very similar. You need a brutal cull of the unwanted contents you have accumulated and a severely selective,
