Meeting culture has taken leave of its senses. ‘I meet, therefore I am’ seems to be the mantra of many a middle manager. What better way of making your 8hr working day fly by than calling as many meetings as you can and projecting your opinions onto your poor imprisoned colleagues?
It’s not just the cost of the actual meeting – meaning the time you and your colleagues spend stuck behind your little rectangular box of doom. Estimates (if you actually believe AI – and in this case I jolly well do) range from costs to US businesses of roughly (oh I do like a rough number being a bit irregular) $259 billion to the little old UK who waste £50 billion annually (AI got bored and rounded this one up I reckon).
So just these two countries are wasting over $300 billion. Or put another way; wasting the GDP equivalent of Portugal, or Chile, or Finland. OR if you want a more shocking statistic, the combined GDP of the poorest 30 countries in the world.
And that’s not the worst of it – taking over some 23 hours of an executives time each week (it was 10 hours in 1960) is one thing, but what about the time it takes to prepare to enter a meeting (I don’t mean reading the papers [what papers??] I mean the mental preparation time. I reckon that’s 10 minutes run up to the starting line for me. Then there’s the ‘cooling off period’ the bit where you stare meaningfully through the window wondering why you just wasted the last hour of your life listening to that droning idiot.
I think you can add maybe 5 hours to the 23 for that each week. 28 HOURS!
Now we canaries have at least a partial solution to this, and it’s two-fold. Our subscribing customers get to use our meeting cost calculator which looks at all colleagues’ diaries and works out just exactly how many hours were in meetings (to prove the 28-hour theory above), no canary need appear in their actual meetings – this is just creating a baseline.
Secondly, when Meeting Canary is added into a meeting we can not only give a precise time spent for all colleagues in that meeting, but also put an ‘average’ cost on that meeting (and we even have a cute animation that tells everyone how long they have spent in the meeting). Then we show in real time if ‘energy’ and/or ‘focus’ is dropping – and exactly when that happens and at the end of the meeting we’ll survey all attendees and ask ‘could this have been an e-mail’ or something a little less pointed if you like!
You can’t manage what you don’t measure, so use Meeting Canary to measure it, recover consciousness when you realise how much company time is being wasted and then measure what is actually happening in meetings so you can return the World to a better more balanced way.