Meetings are important for the obvious reason - a forum for strategic decisions. However, they’re also a massive investment of company resources.

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• 83% of employees spend up to 33% of their week in meetings.
• The Harvard Business Review says it’s even worse for senior managers who spend over 23 hours per week in meetings.
• Overall, employees feel that 70% of all meetings are not a good use of time and keeping them from more valuable work.
• 45% of employees admit to feeling overwhelmed by meetings.

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Given the investment and importance, one would expect a “How We Run Meetings” guide for every company. There are policies on sick leave, promotions, and sexual misconduct. There are trainings on how to use new software, travel & entertainment budgets, and evaluations of new vendors. Why not meetings? Companies seem to assume that everyone knows how to do it.

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What’s the result?

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As Newton's Second Law would suggest: without order, chaos ensues. The absence of any clear guidelines around meetings inevitably leads to an inefficient use of time. Remote work has made this problem more pervasive, because it’s not only easier to call a meeting - it’s also easier to multi-task or even zone out.

67% of virtual meetings are considered failures by executives.

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Why?

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Meetings can be a crutch for managers and teams. Many find it “easier” to call a 30-minute meeting then to spend 10 minutes to think through the issues and craft an email that outlines the salient points. This dynamic leads to unnecessary gatherings that eat into valuable work hours. The lack of governance around meetings also leads to "meeting sprawl"—where meetings beget more meetings, often devolving into unfocused, chaotic sessions. Without clear objectives and structure, meetings quickly become a breeding ground for inefficiency, and this kind of dynamic takes a toll on company culture and morale as well.

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Effective meetings should empower employees, provide clarity, and drive actionable outcomes. Anything less is a waste of time. This underscores the critical need for better meeting practices that truly enhance productivity and engagement.

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Better process for meetings

So how do meetings become a value-add differentiator for your organization?

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Acknowledge the importance

It starts with senior management acknowledging the importance of meetings. If that’s table-stakes, it’s a very small jump to say that process drives results. Poor process (or no process) means poor results.

Many executives will deny that there is a problem with how meetings are currently run or get defensive. But what is difficult to deny is their importance, and anything that important merits some level of thoughtfulness.

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Quantify the status quo

How many meetings does your company have? How many are recurring and how many people are involved?  If you assume a certain hourly rate across levels of seniority, can you quantify the investment? These are useful questions to understand just how much meetings cost the company, but it doesn’t even begin to take into account the costs of poor morale that useless meetings produces. Nor does it quantify the context switching or opportunity costs that meetings can produce.

It’s also massively useful to talk to survey employees and understand both the current perspective of meetings (from those who don't’ necessarily have a choice in attending) as well as where meetings can be improved.  Perhaps the status quo is not fundamentally broken.  But like anything - there is going to be room for improvement, especially if there has been little training or discussion prior.

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Create some guidelines

This doesn’t need to be overly complex, but best-practices are important. Below are some of the guidelines that we’ve seen work very well with our clients:

• Every meeting should have a clear agenda.
• Begin meetings by stating the purpose such that everyone understands why they’re in this meeting.
• Conclude meetings by reviewing action items— aka the "To-Do List"—to ensure clarity on next steps and ownership
• If a recurring meeeting, review the action items from last meeting and build accountability

Limit recurring meetings

Recurring meetings, especially those with more than two participants, should be the exception - not the rule. Recurring meetings become a massive time investment, and often, no one wants to speak up and ask, “Is this meeting really necessary?” If it is a special project requiring focus from a large group for a short time, that’s fine, but define what the time period is as well as the goals.

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Use Email and Slack

If a topic can be covered in an email, resist the urge to convene a meeting simply because typing feels like too much effort. Slack is a hugely valuable tool, but it often also exists in a state of anarchy with no guidelines.

Part of the beauty of Slack is that it helps employees clear past the mess that is most of our email inboxes.  It’s find to posting interesting articles in Slack. And Slack can be a gamechanger for building rapport between employees (looking at you, kitty gifs) in a remote-environment. But when there is no guidance on the Slack channels that this is and is not appropriate, it’s not good.  Furthermore, many employees do not know how to use the sophisticated alert feature of slack, such that only certain channels and direct messages cause an alert.

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Meetings are for clients, too

Captain Obvious says, “Well-run internal meetings will also lead to well-run external meetings.”

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It is shocking how many companies do not log their meetings with clients. Most Client Relationship Management (CRM) software has the ability to record the purpose, people, and action steps for any given client meeting, but it takes some lightweight customizations. Doing so allows for better accountability, alignment, and future knowledge-transfers. Often, one of our own clients will use the native “Notes” field in their CRM. This is akin to a post-it note, and because nobody finds it user-friendly, nobody mandates using it.

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At Everpeak, we created a custom Salesforce object called Meeting Notes that makes it easy to link a meeting to another object, like a contact, lead, or opportunity. We also have fields for:

• video recording link (if applicable)
• agenda items pre-meeting
• action items post-meeting

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The action item fields makes it very easy for managers to pull a report that quickly shows every action item from their teams meetings. This makes 1:1 meetings with employees exponentially more effective.

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Conclusion

Meetings are clearly important. But they are completely counter-productive if not properly managed. The data (and likely your own experience) overwhelmingly shows that neither internal nor external meetings are getting the thoughtful discussion with most companies that they deserve.

By implementing clear structures, fostering disciplined communication practices, and educating employees on the art of running efficient meetings, organizations can see huge ROI gains both in their operations and employee morale.

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