Meetings!
How to stop tearing your hair and
get things done. (Plus: save money!)

The elephant in the
meeting room:
unproductive, costly, time‐
wasting meetings.
31

Most professionals who meet on a
regular basis admit to daydreaming
(91 percent), missing meetings (96
percent) or missing parts of
meetings (95 percent).
73 percent say they have brought
other work to meetings and 39
percent say they have dozed during
meetings.
Have you seriously considered how these inefficiencies affect your organization?
31
Source: MCI Conferencing White Paper, Meetings in America

Annual wasted time in
unproductive meetings:
$37 billion!
Source: Industry Week

Estimate your organization’s losses:
Managers’ hourly salaries
x hours spent in unnecessary or poorly‐run meetings
$ lost to the company.
It could be millions!

Top meeting issues
• Disorganized, rambling agenda
• Peers interrupt or try to dominate
• Unclear why I am in the meeting
• Meeting seems unnecessary
• Nothing results from the meeting
Source: Opinion Research USA

What is the answer?

1. Focus the meeting in
midst of meeting
challenges.

2. Conduct a meeting
where outcomes
are clearly defined
“Check!”
and achievable.
“Check!”
“Done!”

3. Get buy-in from
meeting participants
using effective
facilitation techniques.
“Let’s look at a way to
narrow our options and
reach agreement.”

How about an example?
AGEN
DA

Ineffective meeting agenda
Purpose of the meeting:
• New acquisition update. n
a g e
Topics to be discussed:
• Health and Safety concerns.
• Alignment with enterprise.
• Target dates to meet regulations.

But what will we
have at the end of
the meeting?

Use
Targeted
Desired
Outcomes

By the end of this meeting,
we will have…

Purpose of the meeting:
New acquisition update.
Desired Outcomes:
• Knowledge of the enterprise standard ‐ so that
we can identify new acquisition issues and align
current practices.
• A list of Health and Safety concerns.
• Agreement on the top three issues.

Want more ways to make
meetings – and collaboration
– more effective?

www.interactionassociates.com/ideas