Take Your Meetings from Waste of Time to Worth It.

• Author: Kavanagh, Shayne

Time wasted in meetings is a universal joke of the working world, but it isn't really a laughing matter for many GFOA members. In a recent poll asking government finance officers to identify their single most annoying source of wasted time, meetings "won." (1) And GFOA members are not alone in their low regard for meetings. According to one study of senior managers from various industries, 65 percent said meetings keep them from completing their own work, and 71 percent said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. (2)

Of course, meetings aren't all bad. They're necessary for collaboration and inclusive decision-making. If meetings are mishandled, however, their cost can outweigh their benefits. To get your meetings "back in the black," we need to start with an understanding of how and why meetings waste time. Then we can address the root causes of wasted time.

Breaking It Down

Wasted time from meetings comes in two basic forms: (3) wasted group work time and wasted individual work time.

Meetings bring a group of people together to accomplish some task, so they are an opportunity for teamwork, even if the team only lasts for the length of the meeting. If a meeting doesn't result in good teamwork, it is a waste of time. The most obvious cause of wasted group-work time is a poorly organized meeting, the signs of which include unclear goals, undefined participant roles, and inadequate participant preparation.

A poorly organized meeting also gives rise to a more insidious waste of group-work time: participants may assume from the start that they won't get anything out of the meeting. As a result, they'll work on individual tasks such as answering emails during the meeting. The more disengaged they become, the faster the potential for teamwork decreases.

The most obvious cause of wasted individual work time is when too many meetings crowd out time for individual work. A less obvious--but still debilitating--source of waste comes from poorly scheduled meetings that interrupt opportunities to concentrate on more complex tasks like developing forecasts and budgets or preparing financial statements.

Now that we know the underlying causes of wasted time in meetings, we are ready to solve the problem. Defining your problem with meetings will help you focus on the right solutions. We'll review these solutions in the rest of this article. The key points have been summarized in this downloadable meeting prep checklist, available at gfoa. org. (Also see our 10-step list in this issue of Government Finance Review.)

Optimizing Group Work Time in Meetings

If a meeting is an opportunity for group work, then think of the meeting participants as a team. Successful teamwork and successful meetings have a lot in common.

The first commonality is clearly defined goals. Meeting goals provide the basis for organizing the agenda, evaluating the effectiveness of the meeting, and even deciding whether or not you should have a meeting in the first place. To set your meeting goals, ask yourself: Why am I holding the meeting? Why am I going to participate? What do I want to achieve at the meeting and after it is over? At the end of the meeting, the participants can jointly evaluate their progress against the meeting goals. If they were accomplished, people will feel good about being part of the meeting and will be more willing to attend and fully engage in future meetings.

Common types of meeting goals include defining a shared problem, developing ideas to solve the problem, agreeing on a course of action, and clarifying roles and responsibilities. (4) It should be easy to tell at the end of a meeting if the participants agree on the nature of the problem they came to discuss, have a list of ideas to solve the problem, agree on a course of action, and so on.

The second feature common to successful teamwork and meetings is clearly defined participants and roles. As a starting point, every meeting should have a leader. The leader controls the meeting, including:

* Reeling in and tabling...