The Cost of A Meeting…Do Your Meetings Add Value?

Have you ever been in a meeting that was totally out of control? In that meeting, did you notice that there was no formal agenda? In that same meeting, did it keep going off point and end up going down the road of too many tangents? During this time, was someone allowed to pontificate on things that had nothing to do with the advancement of the current meeting? In that meeting, was it apparent that the key people needed were not there since every item needed to be followed up on with someone who wasn’t at the meeting? Anytime during this meeting, did you feel that this meeting was going nowhere, your time was being wasted and that you should be doing something more productive? After the meeting, did you notice there was no communications regarding what was discussed, no key decisions or next steps? And finally, at the next follow-up meeting, were you totally "checked out" because the same things were being re-hashed from the last meeting with no evident progress? If you answered “yes” to any of these, you are living first hand the 25%-50% of wasted time in ineffective meetings.

Next time you are in one of these meetings, count the number of people attending and multiply that number by $100. This is roughly the cost of that hour long meeting to your company. So let’s take an example of one of the meetings I have been running at a previous client site. It was a weekly meeting and 20 meetings were conducted for the year. With 35 people on average attending this meeting, it comes out to about $3,500 (the time of the resources attending the meeting). Multiply that by 20 meetings for the year and it costs the company $70,000 for that one meeting. Additionally, it is taking key resources away from doing other critical work. If you then think about the effect of poorly run meetings and the ripple effect of the amount of follow-up, ineffective communications, re-work, degradation of quality and eroding of morale, the cost becomes exponential.

Project Managers and PMOs need to keep this in mind when running meetings. When you see the expense of just one meeting, it is our jobs to ensure the company is getting their monies worth for this investment. Although it should be common sense, here are a few things to ensure meetings are creating their added value:

* Meetings must be designed to create a forum for advancing an agenda and progressing forward. Therefore, a clearly defined agenda must be set with a clear goal in mind. Envision what the outcome of the meeting should be and what it will take for it to be considered successful.

* Meetings should be a short as possible. If needed, break the meetings out.

* Time box the meetings to no more than 1 hour. If it is 30 mins end in 30 mins. If 1 hour, end in 1 hour. The longer the meeting is, the more ineffective it becomes.

* Ensure that key members will make the meetings or will have a proxy there who is ready to discuss their area of responsibility. Also ensure the SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) are there for topics where they are needed. Only invite the members that are needed for the meeting and will make a positive contribution.

* Items to be reviewed in the meeting should be provided to the teams well in advance of the meeting to allow for prep time.

* Effective minutes must be captured and distributed to the group. Actions items must be captured with clear follow-up point people and clear target dates defined for bringing item to closure.

* Follow-ups, decisions from the last meeting must be documented to limit the need for a detailed re-hash of the same items from prior meeting.

* Reach out to the team before the meeting to see if there are any items they would like to discuss at the meeting. These can be planned into the agenda and will help limit “surprise” topics tabled at the meeting.

* Keep meeting on point, limit tangents, items not adding to the progress of the meeting should be tabled for future meeting or handled offline.

* Keep a log of areas that continue to be a “no show” to the meetings. Especially if they are needed for key topics. This could lead to delays in project schedules depending on whether these areas are part of the critical path.

* Do assessments of yourself (or someone else who is facilitating the meeting), the meeting’s overall effectiveness and attendee’s general satisfaction with meetings. Also, reach out to attendees to see if they have any suggestions to make the meeting more effective. Tracking this information will help in refining the meeting to achieve higher level of effectiveness.

* Keep attendees engaged. Ask questions, reach out for status, something that will have people paying attention. This is easier when everyone is in the conference room. However, in today’s “network connected workforce”, everyone is multi-tasking during meetings while their phone is on “mute” so we need to find ways to keep them paying attention and engaging in the meeting at hand.

If your responsible for setting up and facilitating meetings, keep in mind the costs associated with it. Then ask yourself, "Did I do everything possible to create the most value for the money spent on this meeting?" This mental checkpoint can be the difference between successful meetings, or ones that just waste people's time and burn corporate dollars.

All the Best,

Ron Krukowski, PMP