Meetings that Don’t Suck

Smart folks have tried to engineer the boring and waste out of business meetings since tables and chairs were invented.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly starts meetings with “a moment of silence” where everyone in the room literally gets on the same page by reading a printed memo. Elsewhere, project managers with the best intentions send out jargon-laced meeting agendas that leave attendees’ heads spinning. And creative types keep things lively bouncing ideas around like balls at a ping-pong table.

Still, meetings suck way too much. Too long, too boring, too much wasted time.

A recent study across a wide range of industries, published in MIT Sloan Management Review, showed that 65% of senior managers said meetings keep them from completing their own work, 71% called meetings “unproductive and inefficient,” and 64% come at the “expense of deep thinking.”

This Bain and Company report documented how 300,000 hours were spent in one year supporting a weekly executive meeting … at ONE company! Time equals money, tens of billions of dollars down the corporate drain.

Crush time-wasting meetings

Our MyObjectives customers share a much different story. They use our scorecard app to log progress on key objectives that are tied to top-level company goals. Employees flag items in the app worth discussing at team meetings. They have visibility into what their teammates are working on, as well as sight into what important stakeholder groups are doing.

Managers jump right into “get stuff done” mode at the start of meetings by displaying MyObjectives on a big screen. S.M.A.R.T. objectives are prioritized by how valuable they are to the company. Things are measured. Conversations opened. Decisions made. Progress documented.

Our biggest customer studied how their employees used the app, and found the following:

  • 70% of employees said the MyObjectives scorecard “helps teams stay focused on business priorities during business meetings”
  • Nearly 40% said the app saves them 1 to 2 hours a week in productivity
  • 20% says they save more than 2 hours a week using the app
  • 100% said they spend less than a 1 hour a week using the app

To sum it all up: that’s a lot of time saved with not much time spent.

Choose fun

Did we mention the app is kind of fun? Imagine seeing your real-time scorecard light up during a meeting after you’ve worked on solving a complicated issue with your teammates. Yeah, that’s right – work sessions are rewarded in the now.

And that’s a serious serotonin rush that a moment of silence, a project manager’s riddles, and ping-pong style brainstorms at other meetings cannot match.

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Paul Niven

Paul Niven is a management consultant, an author and a public speaker on the subjects of corporate strategy and performance management systems, like the Balanced Scorecard.

Ben Lamorte

Ben Lamorte is the founder and president of OKRs.com. He advises business leaders on the best methods for defining and making measurable progress on their most important goals.

OKRs with a Mission

Are Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) too focused on the short term? Not if you add the company mission to the equation.

So What’s the Score?

Scoring for the performance management system, OKRs, has evolved over time. And likely will continue to be fine-tuned.