Writing for life

"Working it" column published in the Career Moves section of The Evening Echo on 22/10/2007

Back in the “bad old days” when I worked in an office, I’d often find myself sitting through pointless meetings, idly twiddling my thumbs as someone too fond of their own voice droned on about something that everyone in the room already knew. There’d be no clear agenda to these mind-numbing exercises in superfluous bureaucracy, and more tangents than your average trigonometry lesson.

Eventually, via a protracted and tortuous route, the meeting would close pretty much back where it had started. It invariably achieved zip, nada, zilch – apart from wasting inordinate amounts of time and money, and generally leaving attendees frustrated and annoyed.

Not all meetings were like that, of course… but the overriding impression I’d have when leaving most meetings was that my time could have been more productively engaged doing something else.

So, it really came as no surprise last week when I read that a survey by imaging company Canon had pronounced “long and pointless meetings” as the single biggest gripe for most office workers in the UK and Ireland.

Meetings originated as an effective and efficient way of getting things done. They were lean, mean business machines: a medium to get all of the key stakeholders together in a room, cut to the chase and decide on a constructive course of action. Meetings were about achieving results.

I’m sure such meetings still exist… but they’ve become increasingly rare. From their origins as finely honed business tools, meetings have morphed into an altogether less useful beast. They’ve become bloated, process driven monsters capable of consuming time and resources at a phenomenal rate, but yielding very little in return. If anyone bothered to work out the return-on-investment of the average business meeting I suspect we’d be looking at a negative number.

In a previous job I used to travel from Cork to Dublin regularly to meet with clients – a one hour meeting that would take the project manager (me) out of the office for an entire day, just to discuss things that we could have resolved just as easily over the telephone or via e-mail. It’s nonsensical.

In Ireland we’ve become so accustomed to meeting the people we do business with face-to-face that we have a subconscious apprehension about doing things any other way. The reality we have to face up to is that as businesses become increasingly global in nature, and we deal with people and teams in disparate locations around the world, face to face meetings are going to become less and less viable.

We need to embrace new ways of doing business, and harness technologies that make collaboration more efficient and effective irrespective of distance. We need to focus on results, and the most expedient means of achieving them. Most of all we need to reserve meetings for the times when they really are necessary, and then only invite the necessary people to attend.