Ah, meetings. Those wonderful activities you do during your work hours, where everyone is engaged, motivated, and happy – just like what you see in TV commercials or movies – or in funny GIFs.
Like this one.
In reality, meetings – well, not all to be fair, but many – are counter-productive.
In fact, many of them are unnecessary. Too many employees are spending their workdays going from meeting to meeting – both inside and outside your office wall.
Internal meetings can be counterproductive. Some meetings are just the byproducts of business communication inefficiencies. Why bother meeting with your fellow team members when you can just talk about the same issues using various collaboration tools like Slack or anything similar?
Consider what a time wasting meeting looks like:
“Our customer complains about the late delivery.” “Okay, let’s meet about it.”
“Our office air conditioning broke down.” “Okay, let’s meet about it.”
“My sunflower dies. Sad.” “Okay, let’s meet about it.”
Jokes aside, are those really necessary? The first example might be, but it’s still unnecessary when you have other, productive ways to talk about it.
Client meetings are pretty much similar, really.
Is a client having an issue with the contract you’ve agreed upon? You do a meeting to talk about it – at your client’s office. Is a prospect showing interest in your company’s product? You fly to his office, conduct a 1-hour meeting and spend the rest of the day “building a business relationship” (read: spending a 3-hour dinner with the prospect.)
But hey, I’m not against any dinner arrangements or any golfing rounds or anything else for building a business relationship; those work wonders if you do them right. What I’m saying is that not many meetings are productive a.k.a. contributing to your bottom line. There are ways that may work better than the client meeting. In fact, in some cases, clients want other alternatives than a physical encounter.
Holding meetings simply because those feel like the usual things to do is a complete bull. In fact, some of them are utterly meaningless.
Whew. Rants aside, there’s got to be a way to help us decide whether a meeting is required. Fortunately, the guys and gals at Wrike publish this ultra-useful decision tree that can help you in determining whether having a meeting is the right thing to do.
Wrike popular project management tools
As you can see, ideally speaking, there are other options you can explore before deciding whether a meeting is necessary or not. Use those options to combat meeting overload.
Please?