How to get your company’s meetings back under control

Senior leaders and middle managers at most companies spend more than 50 percent of their time in meetings. In fact, analysis of the diary of a mining company CEO showed that over a period of four months, he spent an average of 72% of his time in meetings. According to a recent survey, about two-thirds of meetings run out of time before participants can make important decisions. Not surprisingly, 85 percent of the executives surveyed are dissatisfied with the efficiency and effectiveness of meetings at their companies.

The trouble this situation causes goes well beyond annoyance. Meetings are essential to effective decision making and execution and thus to business results. The companies that are best at decisions—and that turn in the best performance—have learned to manage their meetings as carefully as they manage any other part of their businesses. 

We examine four ways to get your meetings back under control and turn them into the powerful performance driver that they ought to be. 

1. Eliminate unnecessary meetings 

Some meetings focus on decisions. Others don’t. The top performers scrutinize their calendars and, as a first step, do away with meetings in the “don’t” category. The key—the scalpel that lets you separate the important from the unimportant— is a clear understanding of your critical decisions. The list should include both big one-off decisions, such as major strategic investments, and more routine decisions that add up to significant value over time. If a meeting doesn’t bear on one of these decisions, cancel it. 

Zero-basing your meetings in this fashion gives you an opportunity to eliminate superfluous sources of meetings. You can ax all the committees whose only job is to prep for other committees, along with all the other working groups that have outlived their usefulness. 

2. Make meetings effective 

The fact that a meeting is supposed to focus on a key decision doesn’t mean that it will. But several companies have developed tools to keep people attentive to the matters at hand. 

One such tool is announcing the meeting’s purpose at the outset. The University of California at Berkeley, for example, expects its staff to begin every meeting with a single statement: “The purpose of this meeting is to inform you about X, to discuss Y and to decide on Z,” where Z is a specific, well-defined decision. Using this kind of tool—we call it IDD, for Inform, Discuss, Decide—encourages people to move the “inform” items to pre-reading materials whenever possible. It’s a simple way of focusing a meeting on particular decisions while allowing for flexibility around the edges. 

3. Ensure that the right people— and only the right people—attend 

Meetings often include two groups: the participants and the audience. At some companies, many people make a point of attending all the meetings they can, just so they feel that they are in the loop. (We call them “business tourists.”) 

The only people who should attend a meeting are those with a role in the decisions at hand. To clarify those roles, we use a simple tool called RAPID®, which is a loose acronym for Recommend, Agree, offer Input, Decide and Perform. Companies that are best at decisions explicitly assign each of the roles for key decisions. They expect meeting organizers to invite only the individuals assigned those roles to decision-making meetings. 

Companies have also learned to keep meetings as small as possible. Our research highlights what we think of as the Rule of Seven: every person added to a decision-making group over seven reduces decision effectiveness by 10 percent. If you take this rule to its logical conclusion, a group of 17 or more rarely makes any decisions. Of course, a larger group may sometimes be necessary to ensure buy-in. But organizations trying to make important decisions should limit the size of the group as much as they can.

4. Make meetings consequential 

Sometimes meetings fizzle out and never reach a decision. Other times, the decision that everybody thought they made never gets implemented. In both situations, attendees start grumbling that they are wasting their time, and higher-ups decide that they won’t bother attending the next meeting. The best way to prevent all that is to ensure that meetings have consequences. 

One tool is the decision calendar or decision log. It’s simply a file through which people track the decisions that are made and see that they are properly communicated to the organization. 

A second tool: ensuring commitment. When Jim Kilts was CEO of Gillette, he noticed that that there was a lot of hallway chatter after meetings, and that some executives were passively resisting decisions made in those meetings. So he asked his team to agree to a specified code of behaviors, including open and honest debate during a discussion and wholehearted support for the decision once made. 

Occasionally, of course, people in a meeting will “decide not to decide.” But that’s a phenomenon worth watching. One company we worked with tracked its delays and found that it was postponing decisions about 60 percent of the time. As the company reduced this percentage, it sped up decision making and execution and reduced the effort for all involved. Not surprisingly, performance improved as well. 

“Meeting withdrawal” 

Because meetings are so common, many people rely on them to organize their daily lives at work. They also gauge their relative status by how many meetings they are invited to. So not everyone will be happy if companies reduce the number of meetings and cut down on the number of invitees. Some will experience what we think of as a meeting-withdrawal syndrome. We have developed a three-step program that will help reduce the syndrome’s effects: 

1. Communicate why the organization is making these changes. Convey the idea that everybody will soon be attending fewer meetings—and that when they do attend one, it is likely to be more effective and productive than in the past. 

2. Role-model the new behaviors. Leaders should attend those meetings where they play a decision role and avoid others. They should push back when someone tries to reopen a decision. Peers and superiors can recognize and praise these behaviors. Every meeting leader can adopt new techniques, such as a moment at the beginning asking, “Does everyone have to be here?” 

3. Train people in the new protocols for meetings— the “new way of doing things around here.” The job here is to reorient expectations about what meetings will be held, how they will be run and who should attend them. Like other organizational changes, reining in meetings can be difficult at first. But you should soon find that your time is freed up, that your remaining meetings are far more productive than before and that your decisions are better and faster. 

Jenny Davis-Peccoud & Christian Wessels