Meetings – a waste of time or valuable part of office life?

Face-to-face meetings are one of the many challenges of reintegrating back into office life. No longer can you dial into team meetings with the camera off because of your dressing gown and bed head. In-person meetings not only require a greater level of engagement, but a greater attention to grooming.

After months of seeing colleagues in a small square box on the screen, we now shuffle from one meeting room to another talking about “strategic directions” and “paradigm shifts”. Alongside that is the soundtrack of co-workers typing, sniffing, chewing and breathing.

There are two types of face-to-face meetings – those that are productive, efficient and produce actual decisions and outcomes. Then there is the other type in which a piece of your soul dies. A friend experienced the latter when she was summoned in person to a 50-minute meeting to discuss whether the meeting was necessary. “There was no outcome,” she said. Meetings about meetings rarely end well.

Things were no better for a former workmate. She said before her team meetings, everyone filled in a spreadsheet of what they intended to talk about, which was circulated to the team a day before. When they gathered for the actual meeting, everyone read out their spreadsheet entry without any further discussion. “Utterly pointless time waster,” she said. This was after she attended another meeting titled “Narrative enabling refresh discussion”. She said the name was the highlight.

Some argue that high meeting loads haemorrhage productivity. You can’t work on a PowerPoint slide when the meeting host is sitting next to you. But others say a well-run meeting constitutes meaningful work.

There are meetings that begin with a “safety share” where someone shares a lesson based on a personal experience to spare others the same mistake, which can be life-saving in hazardous professions. But for those of us who work in offices, the biggest danger is running out of ideas for the safety share. Now they are reduced to the hazards of paper cuts or stubbing your toe.

If there is an upside, meetings with too many people allow you to disappear, so long as you nod occasionally when someone important speaks or promise to “circle back” if anyone asks you a question.

In his definition of a “coefficient of inefficiency”, British author C. Northcote Parkinson estimated five people in a meeting were “most likely to act with competence, secrecy and speed”. If this grew to nine people, two of the nine were “merely ornamental” and at 21 “the whole organism begins to perish”.

Unless you want to be an ornament, it is best to keep meetings small and the discussion focused. That way, you will be pleasantly surprised when you leave with an actual outcome.

Annie Lawson works in communications and is based in Melbourne. She is writing an office survival guide called Move the Needle.