Comstock's magazine 0919 - September 2019 | Page 54

n management
I
bet you a cup of coffee that
you are reading this just be-
fore a meeting, or maybe just
after. Another bet: You feel
that there are too many meet-
ings. A third: This gauntlet of
meetings can make it tough —
or impossible — to finish your
work.
These are cowardly bets for me to make,
because the research says I will almost cer-
tainly win. A 2012 Salary.com survey of 3,200
employees found “too many meetings” to be
the top time waster (at 47 percent). And we
go to more meetings than ever. Back in 1976
a study published in the Harvard Business
Review estimated there were 11 million meet-
ings every day in the United States, and that
number has more than tripled: A 2014 analysis
from meeting guru Elise Keith estimates this
figure to be from 36 million to 56 million.
Perhaps the most surprising thing is how
numb we are to all of this. We take this over-
abundance of meetings as a given, like traffic
on the way to work. Yet the issue should com-
mand our attention. As Intel cofounder Andy
Grove once observed, “Just as you would not
permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of of-
fice equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let
anyone walk away with the time of his (or her)
fellow managers.”
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comstocksmag.com | September 2019
Except they’re not walking away with
$2,000. Another 2014 study by Keith tallied
up the cost of meetings at a jaw-dropping
$1.4 trillion. Then there are the costs that are
tougher to quantify — frustration, burnout,
stress, hurt feelings. So we asked Sacramento
productivity and organization experts why
our meetings go sideways — and how to fix
them.
WHY SO MANY, AND WHY IT MATTERS
Let’s start with the good news. The increase in
meetings has been fueled, in part, by positive
trends in the workplace, according to Barrett
McBride, who owns Barrett McBride & As-
sociates, a Sacramento-based management
consultant company. “Leadership trends have
evolved from autocratic approaches to inclu-
sive approaches,” she says. To get more input
from more voices, we meet with them. Overall,
McBride says, that inclusion has led to higher
engagement and more transparency in deci-
sion-making.
We can also thank (and blame) technology.
Kimberly Elsbach, a professor of management
at UC Davis, says that in the era of Skype and
video conferencing, “there’s no excuse for not
attending a meeting.” Technology makes it eas-
ier to schedule meetings, organize meetings,
go to meetings. And technology has a sneakier
impact. Since so much of our workday is spent
behind screens, people feel what Lisa Montan-
aro, a productivity expert based in Davis, calls
a “cultural pressure” to counteract the screen
time with face time. “People want to feel like
there’s a face-to-face connection, and that the
communication lines are open,” says Montan-