Agenda Item 4

Why Everyday Office Meetings Suck … Skip This and You're Screwed

So many people constantly complain about lost productivity and how it affects the bottom line. But what's really to blame?

The biggest culprit of the billions lost to businesses comes from everyday general office meetings—the impromptu team, sales, update, and project meetings. They're the meetings we dread, complain about, and endure while wishing we could be elsewhere (like doing our real jobs). In fact, these impromptu (and annoying) meetings, which I've attended a thousand times over, drove me to create the Boring Meetings Suck concept and the first version of this book. Many years later, where are we? In those intervening years, nothing has changed. In fact, the boring meeting syndrome has gotten worse.

Why? Because our bosses and companies expect more from us than ever before. We feel stressed because we've learned to force more work into already packed schedules. Now insert these inexcusable wastes of time you call “your meeting” and the negative vibe gets bigger than ever.

So what do we do? We stay late, get up early, drink fancy, high-priced coffee and energy drinks, and complain. Just so we can keep up, we use mobile devices to carry our work everywhere—and I mean everywhere! (While on vacation, have you secretly checked your e-mails in the bathroom so your family members won't see you doing it? Yup, me too!)

Yet after all this stress, are we addressing the root cause of lost production? No. The fact is that most workers (yes, that could be read as you or your boss) have never been taught the basics of facilitating a meeting that won't suck the life out of everyone within earshot.

Therefore, if you decide a standard meeting type is right for you, then implement the following core small-meeting elements to improve your time management skills. More than that, doing so will improve the culture in your organization, your relationships with coworkers and bosses, and even the bottom line. (If you're putting together a large meeting for a team gathering or company outing, you'll find even more help in Agenda Item 7, “Big Meetings Suck Even Bigger”—and ain't that the truth?!)