Meetings

I've been ensconsed in meetings lately and have had the pleasure of learning a little bit more about meetings in the process. Fast Company, MCI, the Meeting Meter, and The University of Southern California have done some fascinating studies about meetings - netting us out with these fun tidbits:

• The average meeting takes place in the company conference room at 11 in the morning and lasts an hour and 30 minutes. It has no agenda and its purported [purpose is complete only 50% of the time
• There are 11 million business meetings a day across the world, making for 3 billion meetings a year
• The average meeting is attended by nine people
• Senior executives spend 53% of their time in meetings
• The average worker spends 37% of their time in meetings
• You can calculate how much money that is with the meeting meter
• Workers report losing 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings
• You can test your meeting IQ
• There are 15,683 meeting related books on Amazon
• You can find 28 pages of meeting related Microsoft Clip Art
• Veer has a whalloping 176 pages of meeting related stock photography

I think what I find fascinating about these numbers is they really don't even begin to calculate the intangibles of the world of meetings: the hours of prep spent on presentations, the man hours lost in setting up equipment, the brain cells lost to managing and scheduling multiple people's schedules to even hold the meeting... The human costs that no one has really taken a stab at calculating are fairly intimidating. Add to that the fact that the world is becoming more connected, more networked, more global, and you see a set of trends on the rise:

As more work becomes teamwork, and fewer people remain to do the work that exists, the number of meetings is likely to increase rather than decrease... More and more companies are team-based companies, and in team-based companies most work gets done in meetings. Fast Company

With the growing globalization of the workforce and the piling on of more and more meetings, the calliber of the meetings people have to suffer through really starts to matter (heck, if already almost 40% of your time you are being paid to be in a meeting, that alone would seem enough encourage people to reconsider if those assets are being properly utilized... Add to that that company culture can largely be defined by the culture of its meetings and you start to realize that the meeting space will be one of continuing and growing import and attention in the coming years.

Meetings matter because that's where an organization's culture perpetuates itself... Meetings are how an organization says, 'You are a member.' So if every day we go to boring meetings full of boring people, then we can't help but think that this is a boring company. William Daniels, American Consulting and Training

Frankly, as will the world of stock photography. Totally unrelated topic but man, stock photography has really come a long way...