Why Business Meetings are frustrating?

Many of the successful managers I had encountered complain about meetings and how meetings waste their precious time, and how they are busy juggling too many meetings in a day.

We all feel that Meetings are frustrating although we know they are essential to the business, Whether they are strategy meetings, review meetings, budget meetings, meetings to discuss problems or meetings to create and innovate, all are important and necessary for a healthy business.

If you are like me at a certain point in my career I was thinking that meetings are eating my day and I should find a way to lessen the number of meetings in my day to focus on other important responsibilities, especially when no results were foreseen from those meetings.

Afterwards and in a moment of truth I realized that the problem was not about the meetings or the frequency of them which affected my time tremendously, rather simply it was about the way the meetings were conducted that made me hate meetings or complain about them.

Here are some manners that for sure contribute to the ineffectiveness of any meeting which eventually lead to wasted time and money in any organization.If you notice these behaviors in your meetings, quick actions are needed to address them.

1- Tolerance for People showing late to the meeting forcing others to wait for them or to cut the flow of the meeting for someone to brief them when they show up. This simply means 5 minutes or 10 minutes of wasted time added to more wasted time on getting people back on track focusing after the flow of the meeting had been cut. Add to that if you are misfortunate and have a following meeting after this one you will show up late yourself too, so Say goodbye to any planning of your day.

2- Accepting that People bring their mobiles or notebooks to the meeting is a disaster in itself as these people will be distracted peeking to their gadgets where they end up paying less to no attention to the project being discussed or the email being followed up. A total waste of time and resources.

3- When there is no owner for the meeting or a clear agenda e.g. someone who calls for the meeting and then orchestrate it according to the agenda. In these situations the extrovert will speak while the timid or introvert will not have a chance to contribute which will lead to missing on important feedback which might have added value to the subject being discussed. Added to endless discussion loops that has no clear purpose or benefit.

4- Not to mention allowing conflicts and cynicism in meetings, where everyone ends up losing. The conflicted parties wasting their time for no outcome but to prove they are right, and everybody else are wasting their precious time by listening and hoping for a result out of this trap. Managing conflicts smartly in meetings is essential for the productivity of them, again by the owner as per point 3.

5- The most frustrating dynamic is that most of the time after the meeting there is no summary of the actions need to be completed and by whom, using whatever communication medium: whether in the same meeting when concluding or by sending a summary email. As without this simple technique there is no accountability. Later people will go back to their daily routine and tend to forget their part. If your part is dependent on others then you will sacrifice more time trying to find out if the other parts had been completed or beg for them to be completed. Actually what is the point of a meeting if there will be a following meeting a week after to discuss what you had discussed a week before.These are just simple observations that we all go through and think its part of the meetings dynamic, but it’s not.

I believe in order to make our meetings more productive we have to create a process for the right conduct of our meetings.

This one step of managing meetings efficiently can save any organization serious amount of money.And Ah…….. We will stop hating meetings too.

If you like this article please comment and share to create value for others and subscribe to our newsletter to receive more articles and tips like this.

Why Business Meetings are Frustrating?

Why Business Meetings are Frustrating?

Why Business Meetings are frustrating?

Browse