Mired in Meetings: Planning is key to keeping conference room a happy place

There are some keys to keeping company meetings from taking over the entire work schedule.

“We try to keep the number of meetings to a minimum and keep the meetings as productive as possible,” said John Himmel, chairman of the Springfield region for Commerce Bank. “We try to limit the duration to an hour.”

A waste of time?

The Wharton Center for Applied Research estimates that the average CEO spends 17 hours a week in meetings, while senior executives spend 23 hours a week in the conference room.

“I avoid (meetings) unless absolutely necessary,” said John Wilson, Springfield/Branson region president for U.S. Bank. “I like to spend time with my customers and my employees. You can waste a lot of time in meetings.”

In the same Wharton study, senior and middle managers said that only 56 percent of their meetings were productive.

Drury University management professor Clifton Petty said meetings usually get out of hand for one of two reasons: lack of preparation and lack of vision for the meeting’s purpose.

“I talk with my students about the difference between an agenda-driven meeting and an objective-driven meeting,” Petty said, noting that an agenda-driven meeting can get bogged down in minor details. “In an objective-driven meeting, the facilitator can set out why we’re together and what should happen by the time we leave.”

Himmel specifically underscored the importance of preparation – and that means giving everyone involved the information they need beforehand.

“(Someone) brings a lot of written reports and charts and graphs, passes them across the table and wants to talk about them,” Himmel said. “The executive is going to be focused on reading and understanding what’s been passed to him, not what the employee is saying – which is not very conducive to productivity.”

Being productive

Spreading information to employees is a necessary part of any successful business, but meetings don’t have to drag on forever or bore workers to tears to accomplish that.

Petty said the key is planning, and much of the responsibility of making sure objectives are met falls to the meeting facilitator.

“If as a facilitator, I’ve gone through good steps to be prepared, I’ll be grounded and have a good sense of what needs to be done during that time,” he said.

He added that having a realistic sense of what can be accomplished in an hour – the ideal maximum for a typical meeting – also helps.

“If you don’t have a clear idea of what should happen, you don’t know when a contribution is off track and how to turn the meeting back to where it needs to go,” Petty said.

“The person running the meeting needs to prepare in such a way that they truly know what needs to happen,” he added.

And sometimes, meetings may not even be necessary.

Big Cedar Lodge on Table Rock Lake has created a way to communicate important information to its more than 600 employees on a weekly basis without requiring everyone to convene in one place.

The concept is dubbed NETMA, and it’s based on a common worker complaint, according to Big Cedar Training Manager Jeff Wilhoit.

“So many people said, ‘Nobody ever tells me anything around here,’” Wilhoit said. “That’s where the name NETMA came from.”

A NETMA e-mail goes out to all employees every Tuesday morning following a meeting of department directors and resort executives, and it lets employees know about upcoming events, visiting groups and special projects on the grounds.

Wilhoit said NETMA has improved company communications, especially considering the lodge’s workers are spread among 125 buildings.

“If we were in one building and everyone was in a row of cubicles, it would be easy to just walk down the line and say, ‘This is happening,’” Wilhoit said. “But here, it’s difficult to get the word out. (NETMA) has helped greatly, to make sure everyone is in the loop on everything.”