We all know it’s a problem. Meetings waste time and money. But how do we put a number on it? How can we really know the impact that the “meeting for meetings’ sake” culture, prevalent in so many companies, is having?
It’s really not as simple as it seems.
Some companies take the reasonable approach of looking at people’s diaries. Whether it be from Outlook, Teams, or Google, they aggregate everything they can from a person’s calendar: the dates and times of their meetings, the number of participants, and so on.
Thing is though, in the diaries of many executives, the number of clashing meetings is huge; they tend to say ‘yes’ to too many, and then at the last minute (or sometimes after!) drop attendance at one because they judge another more significant. Overall, the people actually showing up to a meeting varies as some forget to give their apologies, are away on leave, etc. Many of us also have more than one diary, leading to even more inaccuracies.
The approach Meeting Canary has taken is to be an actual guest attendee in meetings. This provides the possibility of being extremely accurate in the way that meeting costs are calculated. Meeting Canary is configurable; individual participants’ actual costs could be included – though even the most open and honest company might gulp at this level of transparency. A more suitable inclusion may be ‘salary bands’ – so we can have relative accuracy while maintaining a level of anonymity.
This is a decent starting point and will give more accurate information than a ‘diary scrape’. We could stop there and congratulate ourselves that we have derived a number. However, Meeting Canary is all about ‘Making Meetings Better’, and while accurate data is a critical part thereof, real-time nudging is what can actually change people’s habits.
This is how we influence behaviours in various ways:
Firstly, Meeting Canary presents the meeting costs in real-time. This isn’t just a linear progression of time x people – it is more nuanced and tracks contribution as well.
Secondly, Meeting Canary presents who has spoken the most with a thermometer of speaking time. This not only shows who’s dominating but also who hasn’t spoken yet. This should encourage the likes of “we’ve not heard from Jane yet” or even “John – you’ve not contributed very much – perhaps you don’t need to be at these meetings?”
Thirdly, we display a speaker relationship chart. In the example below you can see just over half the participants are being engaged with and the others are not. There may well be a perfectly reasonable explanation for this – or it may give a nudge towards thinking really carefully if the cost of this meeting is worth so many silent attendees.
The next part of our journey is gamification: the idea that you can use areas of game playing to encourage people to consider their actions. Our plans are to make this as fun and thought provoking as possible; we will have themes against time and against cost, such as ‘retail’, ‘leisure’, ‘environment’, ‘tech’, and so on. As costs clock up, we can scroll messages like “you could have sunk six wells in Africa” or “that’s five iPads you could have bought” or “that’s a family holiday to Paris for four people”. Whereas with time measures we might say “you could have walked 10 miles” or “you could climb Kilimanjaro”, etc.
Perhaps it’s a bridge too far, but you could, in theory, reward employees with prizes for reducing meeting times as well. Why not reward an employee who managed to increase their productivity by cutting out unnecessary meetings? Just one of those wasted iPads could make all the difference to your company’s efficiency and help ‘Make Meetings Better’ the Meeting Canary way!