An article appearing in the Tampa Bay Business Journal suggests “If the people who attend the more than 11 million meetings held on any given day were laid end to end, they would doubtless be much more comfortable and not lose much productivity.” This may be a bit severe; but the fact is, meetings do consume a lot of time and money. Shaving an hour off a weekly meeting of ten executives earning $80,000 per year will save the company $20,000 annually. Some people may argue that they’re not really saving any money because the employees would still be paid their salary whether they attended meetings or not. This is faulty thinking. If they wasted the hours shaved from meetings, this might be true. But these are responsible people with goals, deadlines and more opportunities to pursue than they could possibly find time for. Any additional time at their disposal could be used to generate more revenue, decrease costs, improve customer satisfaction, decrease unit costs, explore new markets, participate in self-development, to name a few. If invested wisely, that time could generate results far exceeding the cost of the time itself.

There is only so much work you can cram into an hour. What we need are more hours. In order to get more hours we have to find out where the bulk of the time is being spent right now. If meetings consume ten hours per week, for instance, that’s a prime target for examination. Are they adequately planned, managed and followed up? Do they start on time, have a timed agenda, end on time? Are they controlled or do they wander, with meetings within meetings? Does everyone contribute? If people don’t participate in the discussion, it’s cheaper to give them a tape of the session that they could listen to on the way home!

If your meetings don’t consume more time than necessary, you had better convince the attendees. Surveys at my time management seminars continue to reveal that over 80 percent of managers feel their meetings consume more time than necessary. Common complaints include side conversations, lack of focus, long-winded attendees, late arrivals and so on. Less than 10 percent of the managers surveyed have had any formal training in managing meetings. If managers spend up to 80 percent of their time in meetings [including one-on-one meetings], how could any company justify not having formal training?

There could be areas besides meetings that account for a large portion of a manager’s day. Telephone conversations, traveling, correspondence, word processing could also be labor-intensive areas that warrant scrutiny. It isn’t difficult to pinpoint the areas that consume large chunks of time. The challenge is to determine how efficiency can be increased without decreasing effectiveness. This could involve a change in procedures, techniques or technology. Or it could entail reorganizing to utilize the natural abilities of the people. It most likely will include training programs for the people involved.

I read that downsizing has resulted in employees doing the work previously performed by 3 people. I won’t defend that figure. But I will defend my belief that downsizing only becomes rightsizing when the current employees are able to perform the work without putting in additional hours, working faster or becoming overstressed. For companies to survive, productivity must increase, not at the expense of the health or well being of employees, but at the expense of inefficiencies in activities such as meetings.