If one has been active on social media over the past two years after the onset of the pandemic, one must have come across people complaining about how a zoom call they just attended could have been just an email.
While meetings were inherently a forum for people to look into pressing issues within the organization. These are also a chance to showcase leadership abilities, interests, and management styles. But lately, they have been failing to deliver on the promise. Thankfully, the present day age present new options.
Personal frustration is one aspect, but useless events can be a major drainer on productivity, the seeming effect on an individual can transpire into an overall inefficient organization.
A study by an online meeting platform Fuze found that every year US companies spend $37 billion on unproductive online meets amounting to a 15% loss of man-hours. They said that on average 25 million meetings are held across the US on a daily basis. The study also found that 67% of all meetings were deemed to be failures according to executives.
Instead, the same time and energy can be utilized for thinking, imagining, and communicating in other meaningful ways. Management pundits are advising that instead of relying on legacy micromanaging, managers should be encouraged to self-regulate and rely on data metrics to make evaluations. This, in turn, is likely to increase the overall trust factor within organizations.
This has led to some companies getting cozy with the idea of no meeting days, less micromanaging of their staff, and having shorter and structured meetings. They are deploying more streamlined internal channels of communication stressing minimalism and condensed information.
In situations where meetings seem unavoidable, experts suggest that an underlined agenda, a set time period, and time allocations for responses are likely to have a positive impact.