4 Reasons to Hate Meetings
Last week, I wrote Meetings Blow but Yours Doesn't Have to and it instantly rose to the top of my most viewed posts. Apparently, I'm not alone in my hatred of sucky meetings that kill relationships and morale. In fact, I was recently on the website for my favorite data visualization software, Tableau Software, and on their career page they advertise that employees only spend 11.6% of their time in meetings and 88.4% on other things. Who wouldn't want to work for a company that realizes that meetings can be a time suck of doom?
As my friends at Sales Crunch launch their new website, Don't Suck at Meetings, they shared this infographic with me that encapsulates 4 reasons to hate meeting!
- Manager droning on and on – have you ever felt like your manager talks just to hear himself talk? No one is paying attention. No one cares. The team starts disliking the manager, and it kills the relationship your manager is trying to build. Getting to the point is key to having an effective meeting.
- Meetings in the name of productivity that last FOREVER – Oh, sweet irony! I was once in a project update meeting, and the team was on a tight deadline. The meeting lasted over 2 hours. That is two hours that I could have been working to get the project done. Two hours that I wouldn't have had to spend that night working on the project. To say that I was a bit annoyed at the lack of respect for my time would have been an understatement.
- Being unprepared for a meeting – If you call a meeting, be prepared. It's a waste of everyone time, energy and effort if you are unprepared. Respect each other time.
- Weekly meetings with no point – As I wrote last week, no one has every cried, hurled themselves off a building or even remotely complained if a check-in meeting is cancelled. No purpose, no agenda means no meeting!
What do you think? What is the biggest reason you HATE meetings? Leave a comment!
You rock, Michelle, thank you! We’re having a blast, blasting sucky meetings at DontSuckAtMeetings.com. 🙂
Thanks Jay. Glad to hear everything is well at the new site. I like to go there and have a giggle at some of the posts. It brings a little levity to my day!
#2 Really stuck with me because I’ve been in such meetings before.
Turns out a bunch of people arguing about the best ways to increase productivity isn’t very productive….
Depending on how long the meeting is the employees who attended may spend hours complaining about the meeting or discussing what happened at the meeting.
It is ironic that productivity meetings are one of the worse types of non-productive meetings. Then there is the inevitable debriefing among colleagues about how awful the meeting that also decreases productivity. Those types of meetings are a morale killer!