Naomi Chavez, an internal consultant for Cisco Systems, one of Silicon Valley's leading network-equipment manufacturers, is frustrated: "We have the well-nigh ineffective meetings of whatever company I've always seen."

Kevin Eassa, vice president of operations for the deejay division of Conner Peripherals, another Silicon Valley behemothic, is realistically resigned: "We realize our meetings are unproductive. A consulting firm is trying to aid us, and we remember they've striking the marker. Just nosotros've got a long way to get."

Richard Collard, senior managing director of network operations at Federal Express, is simply exasperated: "Nosotros just seem to meet and meet and meet and nosotros never seem to practise anything."

Meetings are the most universal — and universally despised — part of concern life. But bad meetings do more than ruin an otherwise pleasant mean solar day. William R. Daniels, senior consultant at American Consulting & Grooming of Factory Valley, California, has introduced meeting-improvement techniques to companies including Practical Materials and Motorola. He is adamant most the real stakes: bad meetings make bad companies.

"Meetings matter because that's where an organization's civilization perpetuates itself," he says. "Meetings are how an organization says, 'You are a member.' So if every day we go to tiresome meetings full of boring people, so we tin can't help but think that this is a dull company. Bad meetings are a source of negative messages about our company and ourselves."

It'south not supposed to be this mode. In a business globe that is faster, tougher, leaner, and more downsized than e'er, you might expect the sheer demands of competition (non to mention the impact of electronic mail and groupware) to curb our appetite for meetings. In reality, the opposite may be true. As more work becomes teamwork, and fewer people remain to exercise the piece of work that exists, the number of meetings is likely to increase rather than decrease. Jon Ryburg, president of the Facility Performance Group in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is an organizational psychologist who advises companies on part design and "meeting ergonomics." He tells his clients that they need twice as much coming together infinite equally they did xx years agone. The reason? "More and more companies are team-based companies, and in team-based companies near piece of work gets washed in meetings."

A variety of tools and techniques (plus a healthy dose of common sense) can make meetings less painful, more productive, maybe even fun. There'southward also an important role for applied science, although the undeniable ability of computer-enabled meeting systems unremarkably comes with astronomical price tags. Still, there'southward lots to learn from electronic "meetingware" even if you never buy information technology. What follows is Fast Company's guide to the seven sins of deadly meetings and, more than important, seven steps to salvation.

Sin #1: People don't take meetings seriously. They arrive belatedly, go out early, and spend most of their time doodling.

Salvation: Adopt Intel's heed-set up that meetings are existent work.

There are equally many techniques to ameliorate the "crispness" of meetings equally in that location are items on the typical meeting calendar. Some companies punish latecomers with a penalty fee or reprimand them in the minutes of the meeting. But these techniques address symptoms, not the affliction. Disciplined meetings are about mind-set — a shared conviction among all the participants that meetings are real work. That all-besides-frequent expression of relief — "Coming together's over, let's get back to work" — is the mortal enemy of good meetings.

"Nearly people simply don't view going to meetings equally doing work," says William Daniels. "Y'all have to make your meetings uptime rather than downtime."

Is in that location a company with the right mind-set? Daniels nominates Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer famous for its managerial toughness and crisp execution. Walk into whatsoever conference room at any Intel factory or function anywhere in the earth and you will see on the wall a affiche with a series of uncomplicated questions about the meetings that take place there. Do you know the purpose of this meeting? Do y'all have an calendar? Do you know your role? Exercise y'all follow the rules for skillful minutes?

These posters are a visual reminder of just how serious Intel is nearly productive meetings. Indeed, every new employee, from the most junior production worker to the highest ranking executive, is required to take the company'southward dwelling-grown course on effective meetings. For years the grade was taught by CEO Andy Grove himself, who believed that good meetings were such an important part of Intel's civilization that it was worth his time to train the troops. "We talk a lot near coming together discipline," says Michael Fors, corporate training managing director at Intel University. "Information technology isn't complicated. It'south doing the nuts well: structured agendas, clear goals, paths that you're going to follow. These things make a huge departure."

Sin #2: Meetings are likewise long. They should accomplish twice as much in half the time.

Salvation: Time is money. Runway the cost of your meetings and utilise computer- enabled simultaneity to make them more productive.

Near every guru invokes the same rule: meetings should concluding no longer than xc minutes. When's the terminal time your company held to that rule?

One reason meetings elevate on is that people don't appreciate how expensive they are. James B. Rieley, director of the Center for Continuous Quality Improvement at the Milwaukee Area Technical College, recently decided to change all that. He did a survey of the higher's 130-person management quango to find out how much fourth dimension its members spent in meetings. When he multiplied their time by their salaries, he determined that the college was spending $3 million per year on direction-quango meetings alone. Money talks: after Rieley's study came out, the college trained 40 people as facilitators to keep meetings on track. Bernard DeKoven, founder of the Institute for Better Meetings in Palo Alto, California, has gone Rieley one stride better. He'south developed software chosen the Meeting Meter that allows whatever squad or department to calculate, on a running basis, how much their meetings cost. After someone inputs the names and salaries of meeting participants, the programme starts ticking. Think of it as a national debt clock for meetings.

DeKoven emphasizes that he created the Meeting Meter as a conversation piece rather than as a serious direction tool. It'southward a visible manner to put meeting productivity on the agenda. "When I employ the meter, I don't simply talk about the cost of meetings," he says, "I talk about the price of bad meetings. Because bad meetings lead to fifty-fifty more than meetings, and over time the costs become awe-inspiring."

Engineering can do more than than just keep meetings shorter. It tin likewise increase productivity — that is, help generate more ideas and decisions per minute. One of the main benefits of meetingware is that it allows participants to violate the first rule of expert beliefs in nigh other circumstances: expect your turn to speak. With Ventana's GroupSystems V, the most powerful meeting software available today, participants enter their comments and ideas into workstations. The workstations organize the comments and project them onto a monitor for the whole group to see. Most anybody who has studied or participated in computer-enabled meetings agrees that this capacity for simultaneity produces dramatic gains in the number of ideas and the speed with which they are generated.

Geoff Bywater, senior vice president of marketing and promotion for FoxMusic, recently organized a strategic retreat for the 170 top executives of 20th Century Fob Filmed Entertainment. He used a computer arrangement supplied by CoVision, a San Francisco consulting firm that specializes in applied science-enabled meetings. Apple tree PowerBooks outfitted with customized software allowed participants to respond to questions, propose ideas, and vote on options — all at the same time.

"We had 170 of the brightest people in the visitor in i room," Bywater reports. "The challenge was, how much data and how many ideas could we become out of them? Even if we had divided into fifteen breakout groups, nosotros'd nonetheless have only 15 people speaking at the same time. People were amazed. If nosotros asked a question and each person typed in two ideas, that'due south nearly 350 ideas in 5 minutes! That was the biggest impact of the technology – the number of ideas generated in such a brusque fourth dimension."

Exist warned, though: electronic meetings can exist more productive than traditional meetings, but they're not e'er shorter. "The good news about computer-supported meetings is that the discussions tend not to be repetitive or redundant," says Michael Schrage, a consultant on collaborative technologies and the author of No More than Teams!, an influential guide to group work and meetings. "The bad news is that the meetings can go longer. The computer-supported environment encourages people to hash out things a petty more than thoroughly than they might otherwise."

Sin #three: People wander off the topic. Participants spend more than fourth dimension digressing than discussing.

Conservancy: Get serious about agendas and store distractions in a "parking lot." It'due south the starting indicate for all advice on productive meetings: stick to the agenda. Merely it'south hard to stick to an agenda that doesn't exist, and near meetings in about companies are decidedly calendar-gratis. "In the real world," says Schrage, "agendas are about equally rare as the white rhino. If they do be, they're about as useful. Who hasn't been in meetings where someone tries to prove that the agenda isn't appropriate?"

Agendas are worth taking seriously. Intel is fanatical about them; it has developed an agenda "template" that everyone in the company uses. Much of the template is unsurprising. An Intel agenda (circulated several days before a meeting to permit participants react to and modify information technology) lists the meeting'due south central topics, who will atomic number 82 which parts of the give-and-take, how long each segment will take, what the expected outcomes are, and so on.

Intel agendas also specify the meeting's determination-making fashion. The company distinguishes amidst four approaches to decisions: administrative (the leader has total responsibility); consultative (the leader makes a decision after weighing group input); voting; and consensus. Existence clear and up-front about decision styles, Intel believes, sets the right expectations and helps focus the conversation.

"Going into the coming together, people know how they're giving input and how that input volition get rolled upward into a decision," says Intel's Michael Fors. "If you lot don't have structured agendas, and people aren't certain of the decision path, they'll bring upward side bug that are related simply not direct relevant to solving the problem."

Of course, even the best-crafted agendas tin't guard against digressions, distractions, and the other foibles of human being interaction. The challenge is to keep meetings focused without stifling creativity or insulting participants who stray. At Ameritech, the regional telephone company based in Chicago, coming together leaders use a "parking lot" to maintain that focus.

"When comments come up upwardly that aren't related to the effect at hand, we record them on a flip nautical chart labeled the parking lot," says Kimberly Thomas, manager of communications for small business concern services. But the parking lot isn't a black hole. "We always track the effect and the person responsible for information technology," she adds. "We use this technique throughout the company."

Sin #four: Nada happens once the meeting ends. People don't convert decisions into action.

Salvation: Catechumen from "meeting" to "doing" and focus on mutual documents.

The problem isn't that people are lazy or irresponsible. It's that people leave meetings with dissimilar views of what happened and what's supposed to happen side by side. Coming together experts are unanimous on this bespeak: even with the ubiquitous tools of arrangement and sharing ideas — whiteboards, flip charts, Mail-information technology notes — the capacity for misunderstanding is unlimited. Which is another reason companies turn to computer technology.

The best style to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" — where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that lead to action. The fact is, at most powerful role for technology is also the simplest: recording comments, outlining ideas, generating written proposals, projecting them for the entire group to run across, printing them and so people go out with real-time minutes. Forget groupware; just become yourself a good outlining program and oversized monitor.

"You're not just having a meeting, you're creating a document," says Michael Schrage. " I can't emphasize enough the importance of that distinction. It is the fundamental difference betwixt ordinary meetings and computer-augmented collaborations. Comments, questions, criticisms, insights should enhance the quality of the document. That should be the grouping's mission."

In other words, the medium is the meeting. That's why Bernard DeKovan prefers computers to flip charts and whiteboards. "Flip charts create behaviors conditioned by the medium," he says. "People outset competing for room on the flip chart, the facilitator has to scratch affair out, and pretty soon you lot can't read what'due south on it. With a calculator, you lot never run out of room for ideas, you lot tin can edit indefinitely, you lot can generate hard copies for everyone at a moment's notice. It's a much richer medium."

Sin #5: People don't tell the truth. There'due south plenty of chat, but non much candor.

Salvation: Embrace anonymity.

We all know it's true: Too often, people in meetings but don't speak their minds. Sometimes the problem is a leader who doesn't solicit participation. Sometimes a dominant personality intimidates the remainder of the group. But most of the time the problem is a simple lack of trust. People don't feel secure enough to say what they really think.

The most powerful techniques to promote candor rely on technology, and almost of these computer-based tools focus on anonymity — enabling people to limited opinions and evaluate alternatives without having to divulge their identities. It's a sobering commentary on free spoken communication in business — "Say what you retrieve, and nosotros'll disguise your names to protect the innocent" — merely it does seem to work.

Jay Nunamaker, CEO of Ventana Corporation, based in Tucson, Arizona, and a professor at the University of Arizona'southward Karl Eller Graduate Schoolhouse of Management, is a leading practiced on electronic meetings. He says Ventana added anonymity to its software to meet the needs of the U.S. armed forces. "Admirals tin can really dampen interaction at a meeting," he notes. "But we didn't realize the impact it would have in corporate settings. Even with people who piece of work together all the time, anonymity changes the social protocols. People say things differently." CoVision, the firm that facilitated the 20th Century Trick coming together, provides a organisation that allows for bearding voting and anonymous group conversations. Meeting participants enter comments onto laptops, and the comments are projected onto a screen without attribution. CoVision president Lenny Lind says the system is especially powerful in meetings of high-ranking executives.

"People in the upper reaches of management pay so much deference to the leader, and have so much to lose, that conversations quickly become measured and political," he argues. "People simply won't bare their souls. Anonymity changes that."

But at that place are problems with anonymity. Some people like getting credit for their ideas, and anonymity tin can leave them feeling shortchanged. There are as well opportunities for manipulation. Carol Anne Ogdin of Deep Wood Technology, a teamwork consultant and coming together facilitator based in Santa Clara, California, calls anonymity a "modest idea that's been diddled out of proportion." In detail, she worries about gamesmanship – for example, people who build an anonymous groundswell of back up for their own contributions.

Sin #vi: Meetings are always missing of import data, so they postpone critical decisions.

Conservancy: Become information, not just furniture, into meeting rooms.

Nearly meeting rooms brand information technology harder to have good meetings. They're sterile and uninviting — and often in the centre of nowhere. Why? To help people "concentrate" by removing them from the frenzy of office life. But this isolation leaves meeting rooms out of the data flow. Often, the downside of isolation outweighs the benefits of focus.

Calculator-services giant EDS has built a set of high-tech facilities that go out meetings participants awash in information. These much-heralded Capture Labs, electronic meeting rooms used by the company and its clients, may offer a glimpse of the meeting room of the time to come.

The Capture Lab "is a cocky-contained information network," says Michael Bauer, a main with EDS'south management consulting subsidiary. "We can bring in information from the Internet or from EDS'southward internal Web. We can go information on stock prices, even nigh the weather condition if we're worried about shipping or travel. It's brought into the room, displayed on a screen, and talked about."

It's non necessary to go that far. Jon Ryburg, the meeting ergonomist, offers a few means to increment the "data quotient" in meeting spaces. For one thing, permit enough space in your meeting rooms for teams to store materials. Projection teams generate lots more than minutes and memos. Meetings build models, fill up flip charts, create artifacts of all sorts – "data" that's vital to futurity meetings. "People are constantly hauling materials to and from meeting rooms," Ryburg says. "Information technology's much easier to just store things for later meetings."

William Miller, manager of inquiry and business development for Steelcase, the office-piece of furniture manufacturer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, emphasizes that mobility is about more than convenience. The radical redesign of work, he argues, requires a radical redesign of meeting space.

"Noesis workers spend lxxx% of their fourth dimension at the function away from their desks," Miller says. "Where are they? Working on projects. The way to support that piece of work is to build projection clusters and co-locate desks effectually them. You can post information and never accept it down. Nosotros telephone call information technology 'information persistence.' And we don't talk nigh meetings. Nosotros talk about 'interactions.' It's part of the new science of effective piece of work."

Sin #7: Meetings never get better. People make the same mistakes.

Salvation: Practice makes perfect. Monitor what works and what doesn't and hold people accountable.

Meetings are like any other part of business life: you get amend just if yous commit to it — and aim loftier. Charles Schwab & Co., the financial-services company based in San Francisco, has made that commitment. In virtually every meeting at Schwab, someone serves as an "observer" and creates what the company calls a Plus/Delta list. The listing records what went right and what went wrong, and gets included in the minutes. Over time, both for specific meeting groups and for the visitor every bit a whole, these lists create an agenda for change.

How much tin meetings improve? The concluding word goes to Bernard DeKoven: "People don't have adept meetings because they don't know what good meetings are like. Expert meetings aren't just nearly work. They're about fun — keeping people charged up. It'due south more than than collaboration, it'southward 'coliberation' — people freeing each other up to think more creatively."

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