There. I said it. I miss having meetings. Those of you who’ve known me for a while understand the hilarity of that statement, though. I used to hate meetings and would lament their apparentl uselessness to anyone who’d listen. I saw meetings as a wasted of time because, really, you rarely end a meeting with a new deliverable. The actual “work” doesn’t begin until everyone returns to their desks and re-enters the “head’s down” phase of the work cycle.
Then again, I’ve also come to see the other side of things – for the past several months I’ve existed in a strange world where no meetings exist. I’ve been a consultant for quite a while and now that I’m working almost exclusively by myself, having an actual meeting just about never happens.
I’ve realized lately, though, just how much more productive I can be when my days and weeks are interspersed with the occasional meeting. I’m not talking about the 3-hour lectures we all see on movies like Office Space, I mean real collaborative meetings between cross-functional teams. Brainstorming sessions, check-ins, miniature social discourses – all of these meetings help to ignite creativity in any department and nurture the imaginative process.
If we all worked perfectly well on our own, why doesn’t every business allow their employees to work from home? Think of the money you could save on office space if everyone clocked in from a home office. All the same, though, you’d lose track of things very quickly. Joe wouldn’t know what Jill was working on. Saad wouldn’t inspire Ted’s new creative idea over the water cooler. Mary wouldn’t be able to bounce ideas off her co-workers before making a new project proposal.
As much as you might gain from limiting the useless meetings we all suffer through, you also gain from scheduling frequent productive meetings. A productive meeting doesn’t need to have a deliverable, the mere act of interfacing with your colleagues on a regular basis will reap huge rewards.
