Why We Absolutely Need Meetings at Work
Meetings have a bad reputation, being called the “greatest waste of resources”. But while it is true that meetings can have great costs, meetings also provide great benefits and are therefore essential for a productive organization.
When you do a quick search on Google for “meetings and productivity” you will get the impression that we should completely eliminate them. Meetings are called “toxic”, “the greatest waste of resources”, and “the greatest loss of productivity”.
We disagree! We think that meetings have the potential to increase productivity and make people happier.
We are aware that there are also costs to meetings. For that reason we will look at the advantages and disadvantages of meetings below and see why meetings are essential, and how to avoid the biggest costs of meetings.
1. Characteristics of Meetings
Before we explain the advantages and disadvantages of meetings, we will quickly look at the definition of meetings.
A meeting has four main components:
● Multiple participants
● Synchronous and verbal communication
● Face to face communication
● Work Objective
1.1. Multiple participants
If one person is working by himself it is obviously not a meeting. In order to call it a meeting you have to have at least two people.
1.2. Synchronous and verbal communication
Even if you have two people working next to each other, you do not call it a meeting unless they are communicating.
However, even if you have two people communicating with each other via an email exchange you also do not have a meeting. For a meeting you need synchronous communication. But even if you have two people communicating live via chat, you would not have a meeting because to be called a meeting you need verbal communication.
1.3. Face to face communication
Does a meeting require that people meet face to face? Not necessarily, it is also possible via video conference or even via a phone call. However, when most people think of meetings they think of face to face communication.
1.4. Work Objective
If colleagues get together to meet in a bar to watch a football match they will have multiple participants communicating face to face in a synchronous way. However, this also would not be considered a meeting because it does not have a work objective, it is only about having a good time.
So what is required is a synchronous, live communication between multiple participants, and generally it has a face to face component. In summary, we have four components:
- Multiple participants
- Synchronous communication
- Face to face communication
- Work objective
Many people see meetings as waste or resources and unproductive, but managers apparently still feel that they need meetings because a large part of the majority of office workers is spent in meetings.
So are meetings good or bad?
2. Disadvantages of Meetings
As many productivity experts will tell you, there are huge disadvantages to holding meetings, like waste of resources, administratives costs, slow decision making process, and interruption of work. Most of these disadvantages have to do with two characteristics of meetings:
● Multiple participants
● Synchronous communication
We will look at the most important disadvantages in some more detail below.
2.1. Waste of resources
When you have multiple participants you are using a lot of resources. This is because you have to multiply the meeting time by the hourly cost of each team member’s time. So let’s say that the hourly rate of each team member is 100 USD. If you have a meeting with 20 team members you are spending 2.000 USD for every hour the meeting lasts!
2.2. Administrative costs
Besides the cost of the meeting itself, meetings also have an administrative cost. This administrative cost consists of:
● The cost of organizing the meeting
● The cost of the meeting space, and
● The cost for each team member to schedule their work around the meeting, and thus potentially rescheduling other work.
2.3. Social loafing
Social loafing is when many members of a group become inactive, hiding in the crowd. When you have a meeting with multiple participants, many of those participants will often be inactive. This naturally happens because there can only be one person who talks at any point in time and most of the others are not required to do anything other than just sit in the meeting.
2.4. Slow decision making process
Having multiple participants and all of them wanting to participate in the discussion and decision making process, easily leads to a long discussion and a slow decision making process. This is because everyone wants to be heard before a decision can be taken.
2.5. Interruption of work
Finally, due to the synchronous nature of meetings, team members have to participate at the time of the meeting, which is not necessarily their prefered time. The advantage of asynchronous communication like email is that the person gets to execute his tasks without interruptions and only has to respond to the communication at the time he is not executing other important tasks.
So there are many disadvantages of meetings. However, those can be kept low if certain strategies on how to make meetings more effective are followed. We discuss these strategies here:
3. Advantages of Meetings
The disadvantages of meetings discussed above, could lead us to think that meetings are just a waste and should be avoided. This however, would neglect the many advantages of meetings. These are so strong that meetings are in fact essential to any productive organization.
The most important advantages of meetings are:
● Team cohesion
● Team motivation & team commitment
● Team inclusion & team alignment
● High bandwidth of communication
● Batching face to face communication
3.1. Team cohesion
Meetings can lead to more team cohesion. First, because when the team comes together around a common purpose, people feel a team spirit. Second, meetings and thus face to face interactions allow for more human communication.
If you have used a dating app to get to know new people, you will know that just communicating by message you don’t really get a feel for what that person is like in real life. As soon as you do a phone call or even better a video call you are getting a much better sense of who the person is. And if you meet in person you are able to form a true bond with that person.
Therefore, meetings, especially in person meetings are best to bring about team cohesion.
3.2. Team motivation and team commitment
Meetings are the best tool for team motivation. This again has to do with the difference between written and face to face communication. While it is possible to motivate a team via email or chat messages, it is much easier to motivate a team by verbal communication, and especially by video conference or face to face meetings.
I myself have worked with people that I had never met in person. However, as soon as I met these people face to face, I felt that their motivation as well as mine increased.
Also, meetings serve to give each team member a stronger sense of commitment. This is especially true, if at the meeting team members commit to certain tasks or accomplishments in front of the whole team.
Again, the commitment of the team can be obtained via email or chat communication, but the commitment when you give a promise face to face is much stronger.
3.3. Team inclusion and team alignment
Meetings lead to team inclusion. When you have a meeting you are generally open to input from all the participants. When people are able to give their input, especially to the whole team, they feel more included in the team project.
Similarly, meetings serve to get people aligned around a shared purpose. While it is possible to get people aligned around a shared purpose via email or chat communication, it is much easier to achieve this with face to face meetings.
3.4. High bandwidth of communication
Face to face communication or at least verbal communication has much higher bandwidth than written communication. Higher bandwidth means that more information can pass at any moment of time. While the communication content will often be the same, a large part of the communication is non verbal, like intonation, tonality, speed of voice, gestures, postures and facial expressions. This is not well communicated in writing. The high bandwidth of verbal communication, especially face to face communication, is the main reason for why meetings achieve more team cohesion, team motivation and team alignment.
Besides this, the higher bandwidth of communication also means that meetings can be much quicker than email or chat discussion to resolve issues, and can lead to less misinterpretation. For example, it has happened to most of us that a neutral message on WhatsApp was misinterpreted to be said in an aggressive tone. This is because the recipient could not listen to our voice, nor see our face and thus misinterpreted the emotional content. In face to face meetings we can communicate via gestures, mimics, tonality, intonation, tone of voice, touch and much more, leading to a much richer communication.
The order of communication bandwidth is as follows, from high to low:
● Face to face communication
● Video conference
● Audio call
● Voice messages
● Chat messages
Because of these advantages of higher bandwidth you should always ask the whole team to turn their cameras on when in a remote conference. Seeing each other’s faces gives you a richer communicative experience.
3.5. Batching face to face communication
Batching means putting similar tasks together. So in a meeting you are batching face to face communication. That means that the communication you can have during the meeting makes it less necessary to have additional communication outside of the meetings.
Batching is good because it leads to less interruptions. Imagine that you would have all the face to face communication of one meeting in 50 small bites of synchronous communication, when team members are interrupting your work every time. These 50 interruptions would be much more disturbing than just having one meeting.
For all of the above reasons meetings are absolutely essential to a productive organization.
However, meetings do also have costs, so it is important to do them in the right way. Here we explain the top strategies to make meetings more effective:
