If you’re workplace is average, this work week you will waste 17 hours.
How many hours do you spend in meetings? “My day is one long meeting,” people often share with a sigh. Given this, how productive are the meetings you attend?
An online survey of employees in all industries revealed that, on average, 17 hours each week are wasted in unproductive meetings. Ouch!
Many people we interview report that fewer than 30% of the participants in a meeting are fully engaged. Like a leaky bucket, organizations allow the best ideas, the conscientious efforts and salaries go splashing away in a routine of “time-wasting” meetings.
Ineffective managers blame the disengaged, never comprehending that their own “blah-blah-blah” monologue and “blame-fix-command” approach shoots holes in the aspirations, and results, of all. Thus, meetings become simply awful.
Awfully Simple
There are select leaders who have made productive meetings the norm – by keeping them awfully simple.
Think 10:90. A friend in the auto industry shares, “The more talking I do in meetings, the more people tune out. So I use the “10:90 Ratio”. By limiting my words to mostly questions and speaking 10% of the time, the team runs with the remaining 90%. And we get better results.”
What’s more important to you: being limited to only the thoughts and ideas in your head or being unlimited by listening to the thoughts and ideas in the heads of the people around you? Unless you plan on doing all the work, it’s time to build greater engagement in others.
Productivity is a choice. Telling – forcing – our ideas on others squelches engagement and limits solutions. How will you use the “10:90 Ratio” this week to make meetings (and results) more productive?
How do you effectively implement 10:90 in a meeting that has a set agenda and information that must be disseminated to employees? A meeting that is set up to be an informational/learning type meeting?
Christie, Thanks for a great question. I like to view the 10:90 as an aspirational goal. For example, some people in an informational meeting might typically spend about 90% of the time speaking, and then perhaps ask if anyone has questions (a neutral question). Often times that neutral question results in either no responses, or, people complaining about what’s been presented. What if instead that person had a goal of speaking only 80% or 70%, and used part of that time to ask a couple key Forward Focused Questions, such as: What resonates with you about the information I’ve just shared? or Why would this be important in order to achieve x goal? or What are your best ideas in how we can implement this in a way that will create the most impact? Give it a try and let me know how it goes. – Sue