Cameron Herold breaks down why meetings drain companies: employees spend 1-2 hours daily in them, costing roughly $6 million per company annually. His fixes: let people opt out, start on time and end five minutes early, and ban phones.
Questions this video answers
$6,000 per employee per year.
$6,000,000 per company per year.
Between one and two hours per day.
Chapters
Welcome back to Arizona Daily Mix. As we round out the end of the year, we want to talk about how to make the new year better when it comes to meetings at work because we all know sometimes there are just too many and they just don't make sense. So joining me now is Cameron Herald. He makes a lot of sense. The founder of CEO Alliance. Great to have you here.
Thanks, Catherine.
Thanks for being here. So you, you passed along some information. Average employee weighs $6,000 a year in meetings. Average company weighs $6,000,000 a year in meetings. How do we eliminate these unproductive meetings and do something that's actually effective?
I think the reality is that most employees are spending between one and two hours a day either on the phone or face to face meetings with other people. And if they don't plan them out properly, that could be considered a huge amount of waste. So people are complaining about meetings all the time, but they've never had any training on how to run them.
And so we're going to get tips on what you feel is the best way to run better and effective meetings. But first let's go back to some of the communication issues that we face and that is that we all think email and or texting is actually a better, faster way of communicating. But you say that's not the case.
Yeah, there's so much written communication, but there's a lot of miscommunication that happens because of it. I actually write one of the points down in the book, meeting suck. I wrote a six word sentence. I didn't say you were beautiful. And if you read that sentence and put the intonation on each of the different six words, it means six completely different things. Isn't that even, even though we both speak the same language, we miscommunicate because we're reading quickly. We're skimming over all of our written communication. So we caused a lot of conflict because we're not reading it clearly.
Okay. So very important to just make sure you have that face to face communication when possible. So going back to then making those meetings more effective, you have top five tips that you write about in your book. Let's start with a couple of them. The option to opt out of a meeting. You think that that's a great thing for employees? I think it's a wonderful idea.
Yeah.
How does that work?
Every company only has three resources. We have our people, we have our time and we have our money. And we have to really get the best ROI off that. So if people think that they have a better project to be working on than showing up at a meeting they know they're not going to participate in. Let them sit at their desk and do their work. So allow them to opt out and say, you know what, I've got three other projects I'd rather be focused on. That should be a good thing. And we also shouldn't be inviting everybody in just saying, oh, we're going to hurt their feelings. We're actually hurting their feelings by inviting them to a meeting that they're not going to be able to contribute to. We're actually helping them by saying, you know what, we're not inviting you because we know you've got better projects to focus on. So kind of removing that whole kumbaya group hug and focusing.
People love that. Okay, and the other one is end early, start on time. It seems like a no brainer.
Yeah. Every meeting has to stop five minutes early and that gives you enough time to walk down the hall, talk to your assistant, get a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom and be sitting at the desk or sitting in the next meeting or on the phone, call starting exactly on time and treat it like an Olympic sport. If you're an Olympic swimmer showing up for a nine o' clock swim race, you wouldn't come running out onto the pool deck going, oh, I'm here right at 9 o'.
Clock.
You'd be late. So you have to show up five minutes early to get your headset and be ready to be in the game.
Okay. And finally, I know we all have our cell phones attached to our hips, but the idea being that, you know, check them at the door because you need your undivided attention. Otherwise why be here?
Turn them off. If you're coming to a meeting and you're supposed to be there participating and really actually focused in the meeting, leave your phone. If you're too busy to actually be able to sit in the meeting, that's cool. Go out and do your work. But choose one. I don't even bring my phones on dates with my wife when we're going out for dinner, the phone stays in the car. I want to be present with her. Same thing with meetings.
Good advice. Thank you so much. More information@cameronharrell.com or cooalliance.com next time. More time.
