Does Your Firm Suffer From Meeting Overload?

For those of you who, like me, are loyal readers of the cartoon Dilbert, you’ll likely remember one of the great characters ever introduced in that classic strip – The Meeting Moth. The Meeting Moth could not pass a meeting in progress without flapping his wings in excitement and curiosity.

We all have worked with Meeting Moths, although hopefully, sans wings. I once worked for a company so ensconced in a meeting culture that they would actually have meetings to schedule a time for a meeting.

But it went even deeper than that.

One late Friday afternoon just as everyone was about to depart for the weekend, the CEO called an emergency meeting for 6 pm. Amidst a tidal wave of dissent, loud grumbling and language heard only within the confines of a locker room for the Teamsters, he stood up and actually said the following: “Folks, we’re not really having a meeting, we just wanted to see how fast we could gather everyone in case we had to call one.”

Thankfully for him, two of the larger employees successfully fended off several intended assaults. I reminisced (although not happily) about that day when I stumbled across some incredible statistics about the state of meetings in the U.S.

A site called MeetingKing.com stated that roughly 11 million meetings occur in the U.S, each day. It goes on to say that the typical manager attends an average of 61.8 meetings per month. If you take the 21 or 22 days of work each month (provided that employee works Monday through Friday) that’s nearly three meetings per day.

MeetingKing.com also cited that about $37 billion in unproductive employee time is wasted annually in unproductive meetings.

Want more fun meeting statistics?

In a recent survey nearly 40 percent admitted to dozing off at one or more sessions, while 70 percent brought work not related to the meeting topic.

Not long ago I was consulting with an accounting firm that was considering switching their tax software to a more expensive platform but was unable to garner complete partner buy-in due to the added expense. So I casually asked how long had they debated the subject and one of the partners blurted out, “oh we’ve had about 30 meetings on it over the last two years.”

Now if they calculated the lost employee hours during one software meeting and multiplied that figure by 30, I’m sure the firm would have more than made up for the larger outlay.

No one questions the importance of meetings both from a strategic and staff cohesion standpoint, but I’m confident there’s a happy medium between effective get-togethers and a CPA breeding ground for future Meeting Moths.