More effective meetings from tools and metrics

1. Summary

Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, thought meetings were such an important part of Intel’s culture that he taught the class on meeting basics for new employees for many years. All meeting rooms at Intel have these questions on the wall: Do you know the purpose of this meeting? Do you have an agenda? Do you know your role? Intel takes meetings seriously and sees them as real work.

Research shows that 25 percent of the time spent in meetings is wasted. With 25 million meetings a day in the U.S. you can see how big a problem this is.

• New meeting platforms enable distributed collaboration and facilitate live manipulation of relevant documents and data. But they don’t address some of the fundamental productivity issues arising from meetings.
• If we do away with 20 percent of meetings right off the bat, by eliminating all status meetings and instead use collaborative project management and task tracking software, then we can save meetings for their real purpose: addressing conflicts and problems or making a decision.
• One of the reasons people continue bad meeting behavior is that they are not aware of the effect their behavior is having on the meeting and overall productivity. Graphically presenting meeting metrics related to purpose and behavior to participants in real time would help to eliminate much bad meetings behavior and save billions. Sometimes all people need is a mirror.

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