Studies show managers spend roughly 70% of their time in meetings – are they productive?
When you sell your company one day you want to present an impressive asset, your business, to potential acquirers. You invest a lot of money today in your people. You therefore have to ask yourself, what if I could improve the productivity of my people by just 5 or 10%? The impact would be significant to your bottom line and to your company worth.
A key part of your workforce is your supervisors and managers. Do you know how much time they are spending daily/weekly in meetings, are they at the 70% like other companies? Here are some great questions to sit with your leadership team to discuss….doing so could help you increase the productivity of your team:
- On average each week, how much time are our supervisors and managers spending in meetings? How many of these are standing meetings versus one off meetings?
- Of our standing meetings, how many have we refreshed the agenda for recently versus they have agendas that we set years ago and could be stale?
- Have we recently challenged the need for any meetings that we’ve been doing for a long time?
- Is our team good at effective meeting disciplines, meaning those calling the meetings identify meeting Purpose, develop good meeting Agendas, keep good notes and document Actions that we set?
- Is our team good at the follow up actions coming out of each meeting….or do we have meetings where we hash through similar discussions we’ve covered before because members of our team don’t deliver on their actions so topics are repetitive?
- For our standing meetings, if we polled participants, would they say they are continuing to get value from the meeting? Are the participants delivering value at the meetings or should the participants be reset?
- What time estimate would you make, in these various meetings that your team is having, that they are more forward looking versus reactive and fire fighting?
- How many meetings are we having where data is not leveraged and therefore the meetings are more emotion filled?
The questions could continue here but as an owner/CEO, these are the types of questions you want to be discussing with your leadership team. Many employees have never been trained or developed in conducting an effective meeting. Could your team benefit from such development? Everyone is challenged raising prices and you can only beat up your suppliers for better pricing so often but the one thing you can do today and regularly is identify how to make your team more productive. And in most businesses, the time suck is time spent in unproductive meetings. If these meetings on the whole are productive then your most likely building company worth, but if it’s not, you’re very likely holding back your company worth and in turn impeding your path to a euphoric exit event one day.
