How meetings destroy morale and wreck profits

By Neil Patrick

There’s a hidden cost to meetings. And it’s draining the value from people and organisations every day.

Yesterday I met up with a friend who was passing through. He’d just had a Monday morning meeting with a client not too far from where I was and so we hooked up afterwards for a coffee.

His client meeting had been fairly brief - about an hour and a half. But that was the tip of the iceberg.

Leaving home at 5am, he had driven 300 miles through heavy traffic to get to the meeting. He had spent most of his weekend preparing for the meeting. He’d had countless meetings with colleagues to discuss and gather information for the meeting. One 90 minute meeting had absorbed almost a week of his time and a good deal of his colleagues’ time too.

And because he’d had to invest so much of his time in this single meeting, most of his other work had had to be parked. So he was tired, stressed and demoralised.

Which got me thinking. There’s nothing unusual about this situation. Most people with white collar jobs could relate to it. But does it have to be like this, or am I mad to even think it’s a dreadfully inefficient way of getting things done?

That two hour weekly meeting could cost £6m!

How much time is actually spent by organisations on meetings? The Harvard Business Review has published worrying research by three consultants from Bain on this topic. They found that the answer is that on average 15% of organisations’ time is spent on meetings. This percentage has been steadily rising since 2008.

But there’s much more troubling data in the report. The same research revealed that the weekly executive meeting of one unnamed corporation soaked up 300,000 man hours a year of the organisations’ total man hours. And no, you read it right, 300,000 man hours! That’s mind boggling when you consider that each of us only has a total of just over 8,700 hours a year to spend including sleep! If we assume an average man hour cost of just £20, that’s £6m a year direct cost for one weekly meeting!

I cannot possibly estimate how many of those 300,000 hours were wasted. But there's a good deal of research to suggest that plenty of them were. It would be hard to invent a worse system for reaching decisions than the conventional meeting. For a start, there's plenty of other research evidence to suggest that in the meeting environment, it’s usually the loudmouths who get their way, not the most knowledgeable attendees. 

And to quote Dave Barry, "Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organisations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate."

This astonishing 300,000 hours, didn’t include the non-meeting work preparation time either. It was only the sum total of all the time people spent in other meetings to discuss and review the information to be provided to the executive meeting each week. The meeting attendees would have meetings with their department heads before the executive meeting. The department heads would have meetings with their managers beforehand…You get the drift; a whole network of meetings spinning hydra-like off from that single weekly executive meeting.

I can relate to this. In a couple of my previous jobs I spent more time gathering and organising information for meetings than on any other single responsibility. This task didn’t even appear on my job description.

But more than anything else it stressed and demoralised me. Every hour I spent on this work was an hour less that I could spend on the things I was supposed to be doing, at least according to my job description.

It’s not what goes on in the meeting that’s the real issue. It’s what happens BEFORE the meeting.

To go back to the HBR example, if the weekly executive meeting was made fortnightly instead of weekly, it seems sensible to assume that the savings would be around half – so that’s £3m.

Granted the agenda would possibly be a little longer as the time frame would be greater. But how many sales are needed to generate £3m of profit? Which is easier, adjusting a meeting schedule or making £3m profit?

I’m not saying that meetings are a bad thing per se. They are a critical component of how information and knowledge are shared amongst people and how decisions are made.

But they are also rarely considered in terms of what goes on behind the scenes. They are a bureaucratic anachronism too much of the time. A legacy of the command and control era. And they are hugely expensive, time consuming and in many cases demoralising.

Of course leadership needs to be closely in touch with what’s going on. A management team needs to be working with the same information. And it needs a forum to receive this information, debate it and make decisions.

But the meeting schedule is too often a value sapping component of how organisations behave. And because so much of the time spent on meetings isn’t the actual time spent in the meetings, it carries a huge hidden cost.

More effective planning and use of resources can often prevent the need for meetings, or compress them and let everyone involved spend more of their time doing work rather than talking about it.

If you want to save money AND lift morale…don’t start with your budget report. Take a look instead at your diary.