By Ricardo Sanchez in corporate culture — Jul 2, 2011

Is Your Company Geek-Compatible – Meetings (part 3 of 5)

This is the third post of the “Is Your Company Geek-Compatible” series and it is about meetings.

Meetings are a necessary evil in all companies, no doubt about that. Most techies I know don’t like meetings at all, and the reason is that most meetings are just a waste of time, in most cases. Also, it seems that the bigger a company is, the more often, longer and useless meetings become… why? well, the larger the team the harder it is so to get everyone

For example, in large corporations, it is not uncommon to find people where their solely responsibility is to have meetings about stuff, and meetings about meetings.

Meetings are a waste of time

A tremendous time is wasted in these meetings, people in positions such as software development, UI design, sales, etc… hate meetings for the most part, they know that each meeting takes away a valuable part of their time where they could be reading about a new technology, coding, designing a new UI, decompressing (playing games, social networks, etc…) , Yes, I truly believe that reading a blog post is a lot more useful and a better way to spend some time for a techie than going to a meeting!

Meetings are necessary, I agree. A meeting should be done when face to face contact is required to resolve an issue or to make sure something is well understood by all parties involved.

Fix your Meeting problem

If you are experiencing meeting overload at your company, consider using some of these tools to help you and your team be more efficient when having meetings:

Also, to make sure the meetings you need to have are efficient just follow these simple rules:

Start/End on time
Have an agenda and stay on track
Stand-up meetings only, avoid chairs.
Write action items
Keep them short

Another way to make sure meetings are more meaningful is to have fewer of them. Having meetings can become a bad habit, it is really easy to just call meetings when something needs to be explained, even do most of the time a simple email or memo can do the trick.

If reducing the number of meetings is not something you can change right away, start by reducing the time for each meeting, try this, cut the time in half for your next meeting and see what happens. This is a recommendation made by Lisa Haneberg, author of Don’t Let Meetings Rule!

Do you have any tips to make meetings useful? or do you want to share one of your many horror stories about meetings? feel free to share in the comments section below.

Previous: Is Your Company Geek-Compatible – Training (part 2 of 5)

Next: Is Your Company Geek-Compatible – Vacations (part 4 of 5)

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Meetings are a waste of time

Fix your Meeting problem

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