- Meetings are ubiquitous in today’s organizational culture. Some organizations even have meetings to plan future meetings. But what does all this meeting time mean to your organization as a whole? Or, perhaps more telling, what does it mean to the country and the economy? Data pulled from professorial and private studies give insight into what all of these meetings really mean.
It may not come as a surprise, but meetings are costly, lack preparation, and most frequently start at 11am.
I'm a software developer by trade, so I find meetings especially burdensome. Most of the meetings I'm obligated to attend are either status meetings, which consist of a minute's contribution on my part in which I explain that I am on target for all my deadlines, or meetings in which I am called upon to explain components I implemented to other teams on the project because they couldn't be bothered to either read the code itself, which is reasonably well commented, or the documentation I provide with the component. The status meetings could be replaced with email. I'm not sure what to do about the other kind, but at least I'm not just sitting there listening to other people run their mouths when I could be working.