By: Ana Margarita Olar| Executivechronicles.com
Many companies are guilty of this habit, calling for an employee’s assembly, spending half the time setting up the place, walking mindlessly, chit chatting and in the end, achieving nothing.
It’s about time to break this habit, employees should know the real cost of bad meetings and avoid it.
BAD MEETINGS WASTE TIME
One reason that a meeting takes too long is that people don’t appreciate how expensive they really are. Employees spend some 10 to 15 minutes getting to and leaving the meeting.
What happens during these precious minutes? It is usually spent chattering and moving mindlessly across the office, grabbing a coffee, etc. It is often forgotten that time is money.
An efficient meeting should accomplish twice in half the time. According to experts, meetings should last no longer than 90 minutes.
BAD MEETINGS WASTE MONEY
Many people don’t realize this that’s why James B. Rieley, director of the Center for Continuous Quality Improvement at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, decided to turn tables.
He did a survey to find out how much time the college spent in meetings and multiplied it by their salary per hour and the result was astounding. The college is losing 3 million dollars per year on management council meetings alone. Bad meetings lead to even more meetings, discussions, and disagreements.
BAD MEETINGS EXHAUSTS EMPLOYEES
Imagine you are working on the field located a few miles from your workplace and you have to go to the main office several times because of several bad meetings. Employees get exhausted, become unproductive and eventually becomes lazy either to attend the meeting or to do their job.
BAD MEETINGS ROBS THE MOMENTUM
Even if you are the boss or the employee it doesn’t matter. The result is the same. An efficient employee carefully lays out plans for her daily and weekly tasks and does the job religiously to beat the deadline.
How bad meeting affects employees? It kills the momentum of an efficient employee who doesn’t want to dilly dally with a useless meeting but is forced to attend because of office “memo”.
BAD MEETINGS BECOME AN EXCUSE TO DELAY TASKS
Often times this is the case. When a meeting doesn’t start and end on time, it becomes an excuse for not doing tasks because they are disturbed by the meeting. Or so they thought.
Other costs of a bad meeting include low morale if employees are always reprimanded during these meetings, arguments instead of agreements, among others.
Employees should know what bad meetings cost so that they will arrive at meetings on time, participate attentively, and focus their attention during the meeting.
