Effective Meetings
Your meeting should be an event that produces results or outcomes and not the “process of meeting.” Things need to get accomplished. To improve the results of a meeting, begin by defining and improving the meeting process and people’s commitments to it.
According to a study by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (as cited in Forbes, 10/25/93)
- The average meeting takes place in the company conference room and 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes.
- It is attended by nine people — two managers, four co-workers, two subordinates and one outsider — who have received two hour prior notification
- It has no written agenda, and its purported purpose is complete only 50% of the time.
- A quarter of meeting participants complain they waste between 11 and 25 percent of the time discussing irrelevant issues
- A full third of them feel pressured to publicly espouse opinions with which they privately disagree. Another third feel they have minimal or no influence on the discussion
- Although 36% of meetings result in a “complete” resolution of the topic at hand, participants considered only one percent of those conclusions to be particularly creative.
- A whopping 63% of meeting attendees feel that underlying issues outside the scope of the official agenda are the real subjects under discussion.
- Senior executives spend 53% of their time in meetings, at an average rate of $320 per person hour.
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