Are you tired of attending multiple meetings during the week? Do you spend so much time on a simple topic? According to organizational psychology expert Adam Grant, long meetings are useless, and here’s why.
Every day in your company has something in common. Daily work meetings appear in your schedule. All working groups get together and discuss the tasks, objectives, problems, new ideas, working teams… This is the moment to put everything together and get organized.
It should be a quick and orderly time in which everything develops efficiently. However, the organization doesn’t work, and it ends up being another pointless meeting that wastes everyone’s time.
As a result, you and your colleagues return to work feeling heavy. Productivity drops, and you feel like you are running slower and worse.
What do the experts have to say about it?
Adam Grant – an organizational psychology expert – has something to say about it.
For about 50 years, the meetings have been getting longer and longer, having around 10 hours more per week. Since February 2020, meetings and their duration have multiplied. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has not been an ally.
Long discussions do not bring any benefit. However, science shows that after 18 minutes, a person’s attention begins to decrease. So, why not eliminate the irrelevant and fit the key infomation into that time frame?
One of the best examples is the popular TED talk, limited to a maximum of 18 minutes. They became famous for this peculiar feature. But it is proven to be much more effective than long talks. They even allow you to keep only what is essential, leaving behind everything that does not add value.
There are already companies that have realized this. So they have decided to put a solution to reduce these encounters significantly. With gratifying results, improvements in team collaboration and functioning, organizational improvements, and an apparent increase in employee productivity and satisfaction.
What is essential for effective work meetings?
- Having an accurate and clear objective to focus on.
- The main points to be covered and solved must be organized and understandable.
- Bring together as few people as necessary. The fewer, the more effective.
- Punctuality and commitment on the part of the participants.
To sum up, a meeting must have a strategy and organization in advance to achieve the objectives and not drag on.
As Adam Grant said, “There are four reasons to meet: to decide, to learn, to bond, and to do. Call it off if it doesn’t serve any of those purposes.”
If you want to save time and be more effective, check out our posts on outsourcing in Estonia and outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant.