Any Other Business

There’s a man who lives along the road from me who washes his car with clockwork regularity, every Sunday afternoon.  Setting aside for the moment the fact that washing a car every week seems somewhat excessive, I imagine that this chap has got into the habit of cleaning his car over a number of years and now it has become so habitual that he does it without a second thought.

Things like cleaning the car on a Sunday afternoon, doing the weekly shop in the same supermarket every Friday evening, or always doing the laundry on a Saturday morning start out as expediencies; these are the best (or perhaps only) times available to complete these tasks, but over time they become routine and habitual. We may carry on doing the same things at the same times even though the original reason for doing so no longer applies.

Now, I confess that I am a creature of habit, that I like my routines and that when I retired at the end of last year, no longer having the routines imposed on me by work, I realised that I needed to create new routines as a coping mechanism (see my blog, “It’s life Jim, but not as we know it”). That said, we should not be slaves to routine; we should not be so inflexible that we cannot break them because doing so would stifle our ability to be spontaneous and can lead to missed opportunities.

In part we carry into our personal lives a methodology of routine, of habit, of structure that we get from work and structure is particularly important in the workplace. Nonetheless it is important to question routines and structures that add no value. The idea that because a thing has always been done a certain way it must always be done that way needs to be challenged and nowhere is this more so than in the area of communication in general and meetings in particular.

A regular complaint that was made by people when I was working was that communication within the organisation was poor; I would guess that that is a fairly common gripe in many companies. Unfortunately, in my experience the way in which this issue was most commonly addressed was merely to communicate more without much regard for quality. Thus certain information which was available on the intranet, would also arrive via email (and not just one email either, commonly the same information would arrive in two, three or even four separate mails), be posted on notice boards and advised in meetings (formal and informal). Other information, sometimes very important information, would somehow slip through the net and only be acquired by some happenstance.

Nowhere are there more examples of ineffective communication than in meetings. Over the years I was involved in enough meetings to know that some meetings are necessary but that some are pointless and simply a waste of time.

Effective meetings have an objective; effective meetings involve only those who need to be involved and take up the minimum amount of time.

All meetings should have an agenda but having an agenda isn’t the same as having an objective; having an agenda doesn’t mean that the meeting will be effective. Ideally the agenda should be short and limited to what has to be discussed. The best meetings are those called to discuss a single specific subject; meetings that ramble on and attempt to cover too many disparate topics tend to bore all of the participants some of the time and some of them all of the time. Which brings me to the point of who to involve. Only those people who really need to be there should be invited; sometimes people are invited to meetings when they really need not be. These people then sit in the corner; mute, uninvolved and wishing they were somewhere else because they didn't feel that they were able to decline the invitation. More power to those who decline invitations to meetings they see no point in attending, I say.

And time! So few people realise how much time an hour long meeting consumes. Eight people at a meeting that lasts an hour have consumed a whole working day! And never forget that an hour’s meeting actually lasts a lot longer if you factor in travelling time (even if everyone works in the same building) and time is wasted afterwards while people relate the meeting to those who weren’t there and then have to get up to speed with whatever work they were doing that was interrupted by the meeting.

The meetings that really exercise my patience are the regular team meetings. Rarely does anything new come out of these, after all if they are held monthly and something important happens a couple of days later, no one waits the best part of a month to communicate the information (well, they shouldn’t anyway).

The agenda for these meetings, if there is one at all never changes; the same tired old topics get aired and the only people who benefit are the workshy and those with too little to do who relish the opportunity to get away from their desks. Management guilt about poor communication is assuaged by holding these meetings but really they actually communicate very little and certainly nothing that could not be broadcast more effectively by other means.

Talking of agendas, there is one item that regularly appears on them that should never, ever be included and that is the dreaded “any other business.”  If attendees have an item they want to bring up at the meeting then they should ask for it to be included in the agenda. If they don’t but want to talk about it anyway, the meeting leader should be the arbiter of whether or not it gets discussed. Yes, sometimes something urgent will crop up that needs discussing but all too often any other business is an excuse for someone to saddle up their particular hobby horse and ride roughshod over the meeting with it.

Worse yet are the meetings that don’t have any other business as an agenda item, but where the meeting leader feels obliged to go round the table asking if anyone has anything they would like to say, usually on the grounds of wanting to include everyone. Ye gods, if they wanted to say something they should have asked for it to be on the agenda! I was once the unfortunate participant at a meeting with about a dozen people present and after an hour (of which only about fifteen minutes had any real relevance or importance), we were all asked if there was anything we wanted to bring up. Had everyone done so and had each topic occupied five minutes, the one hour meeting would have stretched to two (or 24 man hours, or three and a half man days). Blessedly the topics raised took only (!) half an hour, but still not the best use of anyone’s time.

So the next time you get an invitation to a meeting, think whether or not you really need to attend before accepting and if you do decline, make it clear why. If you accept an invitation to a meeting and the agenda includes “any other business,” question it, you never know you could be saving yourself, other people and your organisation a whole heap of time.