In October, I took an advanced 2-day course on Effective Meeting Management.  In the first hour of the course, the instructor gave some shocking statistics:

• 91% of people are mentally distracted during a meeting
• 96% have intentionally missed all or part of a meeting
• 73% do other work while attending a meeting
• 39% sleep!

While the rest of the course was your typical meeting class filled with agendas, value messaging, asking probing questions to keep your participants engaged, and dealing with those difficult people who seem to think it’s their job to constantly ruffle your feathers, I learned everything I needed to with those statistics.

We are over scheduled with too many meetings that provide too little value.

I work for a large Fortune 50 company.  It’s a global enterprise.  There’s the guy in India for Order Administration.  A Sales Manager is in Sacramento.  There’s a reporting expert in a teeny town in Maine and a developer in London.  Living in the Bay Area that results in lots of early morning meetings for me with my afternoons open to get as much work done before I leave to pick up my son from school.  While I’ve gotten used to the schedule of mornings packed with meetings, I’ve never gotten over the sheer volume of meetings that take place at this company. 

In my role as a Senior Program Manager, I’m either doing one of two things.  Either I’m in a meeting or I’m performing my assigned tasks that are a result of a meeting.  In my typical day, I have between two to four hours of meetings.  Occasionally, like last week when we were achieving a major milestone in two separate projects, I spent two full days on the phone tying up loose end, getting up to the minute status reports, and working with a dozen people to make sure that we had everything we needed to go live with our new processes.  It was exciting.  It was hard work.  And it was over-kill.

It’s as if people can’t make a decision unless there are 15 other people on the line.

So over the last month, it’s been my goal to schedule fewer meetings.  I’m sending slightly more email. I’m following up with impromptu phone calls with individuals.  Instead of scheduling a meeting with 10 people where only 1 person talks, I’m call that one person to talk just to her.  I’m making sure that every meeting has a follow-up email with detailed action items and due dates so that everyone stays accountable. 

When people show up to my meetings, I want them to know that I’ve picked the forum because it’s the best way to accomplish our goals rather than getting caught up in the culture of more meetings.  I expect them to be engaged because I wouldn’t have invited them if their opinion or expertise didn’t matter.

And if I ever find out that someone has been SLEEPING during one of meetings, it won’t matter that they’re in India or London or Maine.  I’m pretty sure that I can still open a can of whoop ass virtually.