Broken Meetings – now there's a surprise :-)

The MindJet blog has some interesting statistics today on how broken meetings are:

Our European sister office has conducted a study about meeting culture in European companies. The majority of the 800 business professionals surveyed were executives or senior managers. The results are somewhat alarming: Every other meeting is considered unproductive.

According to the study, 61% of the respondents said that meetings could be more efficient or are even a complete waste of time, and 71% saw great potential for optimising meetings if they were better prepared. 46% said that a more easily accessible display of complex information and tasks would help significantly to maximize the outcome of meetings. 61% of the respondents saw insufficient analysis of facts, and 57% pinpointed redundant and inefficient processes as the main reasons for hampering internal and external decision-making.

Moreover, a majority of respondents contended that existing knowledge would not be optimally utilized within their organization. More than half of the respondents referred to more flexible project planning, more transparent communications, and tighter project management as the three main factors needed to better harness team knowledge and increase productivity.

I wonder whether they differentiated the survey on the difference between face-to-face meetings and teleconferences. My experience would suggest that these numbers are even worse for teleconferences. I get invited to one particular set of meetings when it nearly always takes 20 minutes to get everyone on the call and get all of the technology sorted. The 20 mins is completely wasted. What makes it worse is that I know (because I’m also doing it) that most people are not focussed on the meeting at all.

Via The Office Weblog