Meetings

In an average week I probably attend anywhere from 5-10 meetings and lately I’ve been more cognisant of what I’m actually doing in them. Meetings are important for sure, but are they always necessary? Well the last one I attended was an hour long and I didn’t say a single word. Ok, maybe those are less frequent but when they happen it feels as though time comes to a halt and my soul slowly leaves my body and all I can do is sit there and watch it happen.

If a meeting is a gathering of two or more people, in person or online for a common purpose then meetings should take place all the time! I love talking to people, I was a primary school teacher for 4 years. Talking is literally part of the job! but from my experience, meetings fall short and I can think of a few reasons why…

Firstly, most meetings I’m in have too many participants, when there’s more than 5 (and research suggests that the practical decay point is around 8) people drift into presenters and audience members. Ok, maybe that’s fine, but if I’m sat listening to someone talk, I maybe take in (optimistically) 50% of what they say, if you send me an email on the other hand, I can read it at my pace, stop when I don’t understand something, look it up, and then carry on.

Secondly, meetings become “talking shops”. A prime example, I recently attended a meeting with several clinicians and fairly senior non-clinical staff. A topic of discussion was raised which needed agreement for how to progress the work. Within 2 / 3 minutes, an action was put forward, but then roughly 20 minutes went by where everyone had to say their piece, which essentially was the same thing, reiterated to make it seem like they had contributed, to then finally come back to the original plan…

Finally, the opposite is true for meetings that have too many people, too few! There have been a number of occasions when a decision was needed, but the right person hasn’t been there to make that decision. This may have been a failure on my part (or the part of the person arranging the meeting) but when key decision makers don’t turn up, or weren’t invited in the first place, stalemates happen.

How do we fix this? I really do think declining meeting requests must be one of the most satisfying things we can do, JOMO is very real, but practically that isn’t always appropriate. I have recently taken the approach of trying to agree on key action points via email, and if that doesn’t work, keeping meeting invites to 5 people or less. 25 people in a meeting? Come on, having a meeting with 25 people is like trying to choose a restaurant by asking everyone on a bus.

Half the people don’t care where you end up, a third are on their phones, someone near the back keeps shouting “what about Pizza Hut?” at inappropriate moments, and after 45 minutes of debate you all just go to the place the driver picked before anyone got on.