£17 billion wasted on unnecessary meetings

We waste £17 billion on unnecessary meetings according to a survey carried out for Polycom.

The thing you need to notice is that this survey is talking about face-to-face meetings. The premise here is that these face-to-face meeting would be more valuable if they were done over the phone, or some form of teleconferencing (because it was done for a video conferencing company).

I’ve written before about the different advantages and disadvantages with teleconferencing. I’m sure that there are a lot of unnecessary face-to-face meetings, but I don’t think that the real answer to this issue is to move the meetings from one medium to another. Far more value could be derived by meetings being well prepared and having a proper purpose.

The other major issue is that many people aren’t actually ‘present’ at most of the meetings I attend whether they are face-to-face or on the phone. People have so many interruptions that they allow to cut into their meetings that the meetings themselves have a significantly reduced value.

Moving from face-to-face meetings to teleconference or video conference meetings may save some CO2, but it isn’t going to make us any more productive, if anything it will make us less productive.

Matthew Stibbe has an interesting insight:

“I’m still wrestling with how I can change my working practices to become more efficient and focus more on productive work and less on meetings. I think the answer lies in making my communications outside meetings more effective.”

I am, of course, being a complete hypocrite here because I’m typing this while listening to someone presenting something on the phone .