A meeting has just ended and you need to evaluate its return: how do you do it?

How do you calculate what the meeting delivered?

What result was achieved compared with the effort invested?

These are questions whose answers shine a light on something very important for a company's productivity.

Being able to answer them means having a grip on the problems of your meetings (and of your company).

Not being able to answer them means not only not knowing how to measure the results of a meeting, but also being unaware that the company has problems with communication and people management.

And, most likely, even without knowing their return, you keep holding meetings without knowing whether they went well or badly.

A meeting is any moment in a company when 2 or more people interact, communicate and engage with each other in order to act or decide on something.

It is a recurring event that takes up space in everyone's calendar: from the business owner to managers to team members.

And it reflects the quality of the company itself.

The dynamics that emerge in a meeting, in fact, then spread through the company: tensions, conflicts and factions form in the meeting around actions or decisions taken or not taken, and they continue outside the meeting room, generating further problems.

The issue of ineffective, inconclusive meetings is like a big elephant in the room: often ignored, but the time has come to look at it closely and find a practical solution to the waste it causes.

How problems with meetings show up

How can you tell you have a problem with meetings?

There are frequent problems that are still not recognized as such, because the real negative effects connected to them are not taken into account.

Recognizing yourself in some common dynamics is the first step toward becoming aware of the problems in your company.

How often meetings are held can be a starting point for spotting the problem: sometimes there are too many meetings on the calendar, with the risk of slowing down operations; other times people meet too rarely and lose touch with the project and the people responsible for it, lowering the quality of the work.

Many meetings, moreover, end with the need to schedule another meeting: the time planned for the meeting is not enough and you are forced to dedicate another session to the same topic left unfinished.

You may also find yourself in meetings with the feeling of not being useful: you suspect that your purpose or task is not clear, or that whoever selected the participants involved the wrong people.

Meeting time can also be poorly managed because of initial awkwardness, which adds long preliminaries and small talk that cut into the meeting's actual working time.

A frequent meeting management problem concerns staying consistent with the subject of the meeting: you meet for one reason, but during the meeting you often go off topic, opening side discussions that shift the meeting's focus.

In these cases you also end up listening to topics that are neither interesting nor useful to everyone, and you feel the frustration of spending your time in a dysfunctional way.

But the difficulty of interrupting whoever goes off topic makes it hard to get back to the reason for the meeting: when a superior or a client creates these digressions, it is very difficult and awkward to step in and correct the meeting's course.

Even with subordinates or colleagues, people try to avoid interrupting so as not to create tension: the relational dynamics in the meeting can, in fact, weigh on the atmosphere and the working day outside the meeting room.

Long or inconclusive meetings, too many or too few meetings, meetings that end with the need to schedule another meeting, off-topic digressions, poor management of meeting time and difficult interactions are, therefore, among the most frequent problems that emerge in meetings.

Each of these problems brings negative effects that carry over beyond the space and time of the meeting itself and continue in the company.

This is precisely why several studies have examined meetings and the impact they have on the company system and on employees' quality of life.

What science says

The research by Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun (2017), "Stop the Meeting Madness," published in Harvard Business Review, collected the answers of nearly two hundred senior executives from different industries, from high tech to retail, from pharmaceuticals to consulting.

71% of them say that meetings are unproductive and inefficient.

So this is not the discontent of a minority: it is the prevailing judgment of the people who call meetings.

Joseph A. Allen and colleagues (2012) approached the same question from another angle, asking three samples of employees how they would feel if meetings increased and analyzing the open-ended answers instead of administering a satisfaction scale.

The result was that meetings are appreciated when they have a clear objective and when relevant information circulates in them, and are rejected when they take resources away from work: they take up time, lack structure, produce nothing.

In the concluding chapter of the Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science (the volume that in 2015 brought together scientific research on meetings for the first time), John E. Kello derives operational prescriptions for effective meetings by combining the established conclusions of behavioral research with the dominant themes of the practitioner literature.

The problem, in other words, is not a lack of guidance on how to run a meeting: it is that the guidance stays out of daily practice.

Alicia Luong and Steven G. Rogelberg (2005) in "Meetings and more meetings," published in Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, and Steven G. Rogelberg et al. (2006) in "Not another meeting!," published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that:

as the number of meetings attended grows, so do reported end-of-day fatigue and perceived workload
the quality of the meeting experience has a direct and strong relationship with attitudes toward work and with the well-being of those who attend

Then there is an effect that observation inside companies records consistently but that no survey quantifies: after an ineffective meeting, getting back to operational work is not immediate.

Concentration and motivation stay hooked on what was just discussed, and work resumes in a lower gear.

On the share of useless meetings, the overall cost they generate and the productivity gains obtained by reducing their number, on the other hand, widely quoted figures circulate that cannot be traced back to a verifiable survey: some come from polls commissioned by companies that sell meeting tools, others have no traceable origin.

For this reason, the cost of meetings is addressed further on as an internal calculation for the company (the time actually spent by the participants) and not as an aggregate industry estimate.

What the effects of the problem are

It is becoming increasingly clear that meetings matter both to business owners and to everyone who works in the company.

And, above all, it emerges that the hidden costs of meetings (the participants' time, the fatigue they leave behind, the slow return to operational work) can affect the company's productivity itself.

It is fair to ask, then, what effects the meeting problem produces.

There are 3 most evident effects:

1- meeting costs: a meeting costs as much as the time spent by each of its participants; if time is poorly managed, if meetings are ineffective and inefficient, the cost of the meeting goes up.

It would be enough to start calculating the ROTI (return on time invested) of each meeting and multiply it by the meetings in a week, a month, a year to understand how productivity shifts from operations to planning alone: lots of talking, less action.

2- project times and costs: the time a project requires, and therefore its cost, goes up every time the people working on it "step away" from operations to attend meetings that are not always necessary or well used.

3- frustration, a sense of wasted time, declining general trust, discontent, employee turnover: functional, productive people do not stay in companies where time is wasted and stress is generated… those companies are seen as an unhealthy environment by the people who work there, a system you cannot stay in for long.

The most common mistakes in solving the problem

Realizing that meetings can become a problem, if they are poorly designed and managed, is already a step toward the solution.

How do people behave, then, when faced with a recognized problem?

Often you may decide to keep the problem, accepting it without acting to solve it (because you lack the resources or skills to intervene), or you may decide to act to solve it (not always in an effective direction).

It is, in fact, common to lean toward the wrong solutions, which not only fail to solve the problem at its origin but sometimes create a cascade of further ones.

Among the most common ineffective solutions are:

1- taking communication courses: people sign up thinking that communication is the gap to fill, that meetings work badly because the company has a communication problem.

Those who pick communication as the priority cause are actually staying on the surface, settling for working on an effect. The worst damage is that they stop trying to solve the real problem.

2- pursuing efficiency at all costs: holding fewer meetings or making them shorter to save time.

This choice, apparently logical, actually makes the situation worse, because it tends only to increase tension by squeezing time: more work (done badly because it has no method) in less time.

Why are these solutions not effective?

Because they are not priority solutions: this is not where you need to start to solve the problem with meetings (or any other problem).

To solve a problem for good, you need to start from a method and respect its rules: you need to work on how things are done.

Every problem should be tackled, first of all, by identifying the real cause that generates it within the process involved, defining the gap that produced it and proposing a practical solution that addresses and fills that gap.

This article tackles the specific problem of meetings precisely by providing an executive method and operational solutions that work on the real cause of the problem: but any business problem can be tackled and solved this way.

According to the proposed method, the first step to solving a problem is therefore to analyze the process involved.

Where to look for the cause of the problem: analyzing the process involved

Finding the right solution, one that resolves the symptom for good, is possible if you proceed with a method.

Problem solving alone is not enough: you need to start from analyzing the problem.

Problem analysis is the most important part of the problem-solving process: if the analysis is done well, the solution that solves the problem emerges clearly and is easier to apply.

It is a fundamental skill that requires a method, but once acquired it can be applied to solve any type of problem, business or personal.

It should be said that the method for solving a problem starts even before the analysis: you need to see problems, know how to write them down and put them in a hierarchical order.

If you do not even realize you have a problem, it will be impossible to solve it.

Without this skill, problems remain unseen and therefore unaddressed: the problem keeps repeating and the system pays the negative effects without solving them.

This is precisely why Prodability Academy created an online course to develop this skill: "Problem Noting - Fai ordine nei tuoi problemi," to learn how to correctly see, write down and order the problems of a system.

The program lets you become autonomous and independent in spotting your company's problems, defining them precisely and putting them in order of priority.

Problem noting, then, comes before problem solving and is a fundamental skill for understanding a system's problems in depth and being able to solve them in a lasting, stable way.

The analysis of the problem, once it has been seen and defined as a priority, then starts by asking in which phase of the process its real cause lies.

The phases of the process in which the real cause of the meeting problem can lie are:

1- meeting design

2- meeting invitation

3- meeting acceptance

4-running the meeting

5- meeting analysis

Each phase contains a cause that can be the origin of the meeting problem.

In this article, the phase of the process concerning meeting design is isolated and analyzed.

Identifying the real cause of the problem

What can go wrong in the meeting design phase?

What can cause a meeting to waste time and become a cost for the company?

A meeting is poorly designed when there is no clear, unambiguous classification of meetings and when there is no specific agenda for each type of meeting that reduces dead time and makes meetings highly effective and efficient.

If the real cause is a gap, what fills it are 3 operational solutions to apply in the meeting design phase:

establish the types of meetings and create a checklist for each of them
always define the start and end of the meeting in the meeting design phase
appoint a neutral party who enforces the checklist and makes sure the final output is reached

Let's look at them in detail.

The operational solutions

The proposed solutions develop an executive method and therefore work on how meetings are run.

To make meetings highly effective and efficient, you need to apply 3 solutions that are also rules to follow.

Solution 1 — Establish the types of meetings and create a checklist for each of them

To identify the possible types of meetings, start by asking yourself:

what is the function/purpose of the meeting?

what does it produce?

There will be as many types of meetings as there are different outputs a meeting can generate: a meeting can create only one output.

There cannot be meetings with more than one function.

Once the types of meetings have been defined, they need to be shared across the company: this way everyone will follow the rule and each meeting will have a single function.

For each function, specific tools also need to be defined:

a checklist with the specific phases of that type of meeting
assets (documents) useful for carrying out the meeting's function

Examples of meeting categories are:

1- INFORMATION OR UPDATE MEETING: produces participants who are informed or updated on something

2- BRAINSTORMING MEETING: produces a list of ideas (on how to do something)

3- DECISION MEETING: produces a decision made

4- MONITORING MEETINGS: produces the schedule (calendar) created/updated

Once the types of meetings are clear and the new order has been shared through an agreement within the company, mixing functions must no longer be allowed: within a meeting, no other topics belonging to other functions are discussed.

Solution 2 — Always define the start and end of the meeting in the meeting design phase

An effective and efficient meeting always makes the start and end times clear to participants, from the very first communication.

The meeting checklist includes every phase and also the duration of each phase: a clear, structured agenda to follow during the meeting.

The pace of the meeting is planned in advance: the agenda tells you precisely how much time the meeting needs.

Solution 3 — Appoint a neutral party who enforces the checklist and makes sure the final output is reached

A neutral party is a meeting participant whose task is to enforce the timing and keep the discussion consistent with the subject of the meeting.

The idea is to choose this moderator in advance and give them the authority to intervene in the meeting, so that their interventions do not create tension or conflict, because it is an agreed and recognized role.

The neutral party, equipped with the meeting's checklist and assets, follows all the phases, checks the duration and takes the floor to regulate the discussion.

This precision reduces:

wasted time (and therefore money),
the lack of clarity at the end of the meeting (and therefore the sense of inadequacy)
the involvement of participants who are not needed for the meeting's function (and therefore the frustration of feeling disoriented and useless)

Three operational solutions, practical rules to adopt and follow, that can produce immediate positive effects and solve problems that put a company's health at risk.

Every problem (even the most hidden one) can be solved in a stable way by adopting a method that starts from problem noting, goes through cause and process analysis, and culminates in an operational solution.

Sources and references

Perlow, L. A., Hadley, C. N., & Eun, E. (2017). Stop the Meeting Madness. Harvard Business Review, 95(4), 62–69.

Allen, J. A., Sands, S. J., Mueller, S. L., Frear, K. A., Mudd, M., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2012). Employees' feelings about more meetings: An overt analysis and recommendations for improved meetings. Management Research Review, 35(5), 405–418. https://doi.org/10.1108/01409171211222331

Kello, J. E. (2015). The Science and Practice of Workplace Meetings. In J. A. Allen, N. Lehmann-Willenbrock & S. G. Rogelberg (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Meeting Science (pp. 709–734). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107589735.030

Rogelberg, S. G., Leach, D. J., Warr, P. B., & Burnfield, J. L. (2006). "Not Another Meeting!" Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being?. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91(1), 83–96. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.91.1.83

Luong, A., & Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9(1), 58–67. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2699.9.1.58