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VNU eMedia, Inc. Dec 2003| [Headnote] |
| Looking to keep office powwows brief? Take away the boardroom chairs |
In a recent survey of 613 workers by Office Team, nearly one third of all respondents said that "meetings that last too long" was the biggest time waster at work. You don't have to tell that to David Macey, president of Macey Noyes Associates, a brand development firm based in Wilton, Connecticut. For a few years now, Macey has been holding a weekly midlevel management meeting that includes all of the company's account managers and principals. About a month ago, Macey says he noticed that the managers were becoming less than enthused about the weekly sessions.
"The meetings were dragging on and on, some to about two hours, which was a little ridiculous," he says. When the managers would exit a weekly meeting, he says, they would run back to their desks, "totally stressed about the work they had to do in the rest of the day."
Macey knew he had to do something to slim down the meetings. The result? He now keeps such sessions tightly focused by appointing a facilitator to keep things on track. Each manager takes his turn facilitating, and when a meeting strays off the topic, Macey says, the facilitator is vigilant about returning to the agenda. "He basically says, 'Guys, this has got to go in the parking lot,'" Macey says. The "parking lot" is a whiteboard on which items that are not on the agenda are recorded for discussion at a later time. This strategy has helped Macey trim down the weekly meetings to about an hour or less.
Some managers are taking even more drastic steps to cut meeting time, according to Brad Cooper, a speaker and author based in Denver, who often speaks on time management topics. Recently, Cooper witnessed a situation in a meeting where a manager taped $50 bills to the wall and said those who finished their presentations on time could have one of the bills.
Here are some tactics Cooper recommends for keeping meetings short:
KEEP THEM STANDING. "Eliminate chairs from the room and everyone will be much more motivated to get through things quickly," he says. "Gravity doesn't get a chance to take effect."
GIVE EVERYONE A BELL, like the ones that are used at the front desk of a hotel, Cooper says. If anyone gets off track, attendees are welcome to ding away.
REPLACE REGULAR MEETINGS WITH "HUDDLES," smaller, 15-minute sessions in which attendees rotate in and out of the room as soon as the portion of the meeting with which they are involved is over. "I've used this personally for years, and it's been very effective," Cooper says.
-Melinda Ligos
My Research
