According to a research by Personal Presentation Ltd, “Office workers waste 52 minutes per day in meetings”.
Now, this is near to 11% of the overall available time. Massive! Even if I think is optimistic.
What Julia Goodman, founder of the UK firm is suggesting, to sort this issue out, is to train people in more effective communication (this is what they sell), so that they can better contribute to meetings and not waste time.
In my personal experience, there’s a much better solution: cut your meetings by 20%, 50% or, why not, 90%. The only meetings a company truly needs are those with customers.
The 2.0 communication tools can easily handle the majority of the remaining internal interaction opportunities.
Have you ever experienced that nasty feeling, when you enter a shop and you see that the employees keep talking one each other about their personal stuff instead of asking you: “what can I do for you?”.
This is the analog of internal meetings in big corporations held while customers, out there, are meeting with their competitors.
Nevertheless, in many cases, most of the questions that arise during an internal meeting would require the presence of a customer to get an answer. Sounds familiar?
I think that if we want to speculate about the future, a god guess is to look what boys and girls under 14 are doing now. Looking at the way they communicate (IM, SMS, email, twitter,…) you can see the pattern for new corporations, where there will be much less meetings and much more communication.
Sorry, I’ve to go. I’ve a meeting starting in 3 minutes….:-)
