When meetings are a waste of time?

1.      No agenda, no goals and no purpose

2.      No advance communication 

3.      Participants are not interested, involved and there is no interaction

4.      No time management

5.      Allowing conflict to get out of control (chaos)

6.      Long and endless discussions without reaching consensus

7.      No focus or direction towards the main goal

8.      Not controlling difficult behavior

9.      Not summarizing actions = misunderstanding of next steps

10.   Participants have different goals that are conflicting

11.   Wrong audience

12.   No or weak leadership

Meetings are one of those necessary evils of business; important for exchanging thoughts and ideas, making plans, and reviewing progress, but all too often interminably long and a huge drain on cost and productivity.

How essential are they? Could business owners get away with scrapping at least some of these official gatherings? Are there better, more efficient ways of holding meetings, or are meetings simply a business tradition that is here to stay?

The consensus of the business world seems to be that at least some meetings could be dropped without being missed.

Stephen Archer, director of Spring Partnerships, reckons that most executives spend around a quarter of their year in totally pointless meetings, and another quarter in ill-managed meetings that could have been shorter and more effective in many ways.

He says: “The kind of meetings that should be scrapped are any that lack objectives, an agenda or clarity on what is expected of each participant. Also any meeting without a time limit or that takes excessive time should be questioned. Any meeting over three hours long needs serious justification.”

There are ways of keeping meetings short and sweet without appearing rude or too abrupt. Setting a strict agenda and staying on topic will keep people focused. Training people to have effective chairing skills is also key – good chairing leads to good decision making, inclusion of the views of all parties, and good time keeping.

Inviting the right people, and the right number of people, will improve the efficiency and outcome of a meeting, says Ian Baxter, chairman of Baxter Freight.

He says: “If your meeting has a purpose then you really only need those who can help achieve it to be there. Don’t invite the chief executive to discuss invoice queries. She may end up derailing the whole process. But don’t expect decisions to be made if the decision-maker isn’t there.

“And while meetings with40 people in them may have their purpose, neither negotiation nor decision-making are generally it. A maximum of six people works best for me. If you want to handle a difficult issue where a climb-down or loss of face is likely, do it on a one-to-one basis.”

Some business meetings take place that seem to serve little purpose.

Tony Brown, account director at marketing consultancy HAMG360, recalls working for a magazine headed up by a publisher who devised the concept of a quarterly performance meeting with all the staff.

He says: “To prepare for that meeting, he had all the senior managers sat around the table, and for an hour we discussed whether it would be best to use line diagrams or pie-charts. I kid you not, about eight of us were involved in this discussion, and I estimated that on a charge-out basis, that meeting cost the company close to £1,500.”

The craziest meetings Archer recalls attending were those where everyone has their laptop open and is working on their emails.

He says: “If I had a pound for every time someone said ‘sorry I missed that question’ or ‘can you re-cap please?’ I would be rich. There is at least one global organisation that I know of that encourages this type of meeting. They like multi-taskers and people who can do their mail and contribute to a meeting. They also believe that the earth is flat.”

For some companies, the stand-up meeting, a concept pioneered in American boardrooms, is a viable solution that keeps things timely, focused, and the participants, literally, on their toes.

Paul Lees, founder and chief executive of conference call provider Powwownow, says: “We hold all our development ‘scrum’ meetings as stand-ups, keeping them quick and to the point. And a standing policy in meetings certainly makes people get to the point a lot quicker.”

Dominic Irvine, founder of leadership and development consultancy Epiphanies LLP agrees, for the simple reason that it avoids any under-the-desk digital distractions.

He says: “You should stand up for your meetings. It’s hard to use laptops when standing. iPads or their equivalent are not much easier. Smart phones are the easiest of all but their use when standing is much more conspicuous than when seated behind a table.

“The benefits of standing go way beyond maintaining focus on the discussion at hand. According to some research done in the late90s, stand-up meetings produce decisions just as good as sit-down meetings but in far less time.”

In spite of the largely negative perception of meetings, many would not contemplate running a business without them.

Lauren Ingram, an account manager at Clarity PR, is an advocate of well-planned meeting schedules, having previously worked in a meeting-free zone.

She says: “A former employer refused to have any meetings whatsoever, not even stand-up meetings, insisting they were a waste of time. That’s the only period I’ve felt I needed more meetings in my week. It was awful, as nobody knew what the rest of the team was working on and there was never a sense that we were working on the same overall goals.”

Most weeks Ingram sets a maximum of one or two meetings per day, which works well for productivity, leaves plenty of time for concentrating on the day’s tasks, but also provides some structure, acting as mini deadlines throughout the day.

Jason Atkinson, managing director of interim management recruitment provider Russam GMS, is of the view that all meetings have some value, particularly in an industry like recruitment.

He says: “I have been in many seemingly pointless meetings though I always still try to come away with at least two nuggets of gold, possibly a referral, or an interesting piece of business information.”

And today, with too many emails flying about, he worries for the future of meetings.

“Personally I find it difficult to be rude and finish meetings early,” he says. “I keep going for at least30 minutes. Often the best comes out of the final three minutes, when a client is ready to make an order, or when the ice is broken and the relationship has moved on in a positive way.”

Meetings becomes a waste of time if the discussion during the meeting goes beyond the set agenda thus, consuming more time before coming into agreements.

If it doesn't have any content to communicate to team

Simply trying to show off the bossim

Simply trying to kill the time rather discussing any valid points.

My2 cents.

Reasons for wrong meeting are

Attending the meeting with less knowledge and unprepared,

Concentrating and speaking too much out of context

Sitting silent without contributing anything

No home work done on the topic

Attends meeting without keeping the notes thus resulting in loss of the main context and leaving the meeting room unplanned

Ingredients for a perfect meeting are to:

Have a clear idea and agenda about the meeting and its objective.

Forecast the critical things you want to say, communicate, or ask

Listen. Rather, be present and actively listen.

Make sure to note any action items that come up.

If anything hasn’t been answered, ask!

Follow up. If appropriate, say thank you!

Always leave with a plan.

I go for the answer provided by Mr. Ibrahim Hussein Mayaleh.

Meetings are usually useless. We should meet little less. unfortunately nowadays meetings have become status symbol.

Having said that, meetings are sometimes unavoidable.

In that case meeting becomes meaningless if,

We leave the room without action plan

We do not follow up on action plan from last meeting and hold people accountable.

it goes on and on and on.

It is useless when an unofficial topic is taken for discussion. Though you have necessary documentations to present, and later you realize it is way out of your domain. 

Meetings are waste of time if they lack the objectives and there are no possible outcomes.

i fully agree with the answer been added by EXPERTS.................Thanks.

 Also when u know the outcome of the meeting before hand. it is merely a sham, a mere formality, than an interactive session. When communication is only one sided from the top downwards. It is better to send emails rather than discuss it if it is only to inform so that the recipients cannot claim later that they were not informed. It is done basically to save ones own skin.