Sarah Geraghty: Meetings can be the worst part of work. Here's how to sort them out

Originally published in The Journal.

We've accepted meetings as an unavoidable pain of working life.

“That’s what I dread on Sundays,” a manager in pharma told me. “Checking the calendar to see how many pointless meetings have been added.”

If decisions are the lifeblood of organisations – and meetings are where those decisions are supposed to happen – we’re in trouble. One client estimates that she and her counterparts are spending, on average, six hours a day on them.

A McKinsey survey found that 61% of executives say at least half their decision-making time is ineffective. So much wasted effort disguised as progress.

In the last six months, I’ve worked with at least three companies who booked presentation skills training that morphed into “meeting skills” training. Scratch beneath most teams’ problems – crossed wires, low morale, lack of focus – and you often find not incompetence but bad meetings.

Think of the global call with 200 people: half of them mute, cameras off, slides that won’t load or lull you to sleep. The hour-long “catch-up” that could have been a 10-minute chat or a two-line email. The “quick update” that spawns three follow-ups. The reflexive “let’s meet on that again next week” that keeps the wheel turning.

Click here to read Sarah's full article.