My company is moving its corporate headquarters. It is simply amazing how a 72-hour event can waste six months of a person’s life (mine). I exaggerate slightly when I say waste. On the other hand at least 50% of the meetings I have attended related to this process have been redundant or unnecessary.
Job satisfaction, in my mind, is highly dependent on how much employees are treated as stakeholders versus how much they are micromanaged. Meetings can be good tools for communicating. They can also be good tools for micromanagers to ensure that control is being maintained. I am not going to go into extreme detail on the topic in this post, other than to state I have never attended a meeting with more than six people sitting around a table at one time that wasn’t wasting four of the people’s time 75% of the meeting’s duration.
Did that confuse you? The bottom line is – think about why you are having a meeting and whether or not everyone really needs to be there.