Managing Meetings for Productivity and Effectiveness
All managers strive to get the most productivity from their staff. There is a whole business philosophy on improving value-added work called Lean Principles. Lean is a mindset that makes employees thinks of ways to reduce wasteful actions, and concentrate on actions that are direct labor into the product or service.
Lean principles look to eliminate anything wasteful in every process. If the experts consider meetings to have many wasteful activities happening, then there are plenty opportunities to eliminate it. Great champions of Lean can identify things that people do inside business meetings that are non-value added work. We look to eliminate this from the process by making employees aware this is taking place. By educating the teams on time-wasting activities, we can take steps to prevent them from happening.
"Maaa-daaaa", Steven tried in vain to understand the word so foreign to him.
Daniel quickly corrected him. "No Muda, like a cow. Moooooo - da," he continued on, with a short explanation "It's the Japanese word for waste."
He continued, "In Lean training this week, we learned how to eliminate waste from our daily business. We mapped out all of our processes, looking for things that do not make much sense, that we accept as normal. You would be surprised."
Steven was very interested in this strange Muda thing. He was adjusting to his new role as manager of the production engineering team. It was his job to oversee how they produce and manufacture the products of his company. He was sure there was a ton of waste in the tooling process they review every day in their meetings. He just needs a heavyweight champion to point out where the wasteful tooling was.
Steven wanted to learn as much as possible about Lean to help streamline his department. He was sure he could find this "Muda" thing in how they set up the tools, stamp, and build production parts. He was confident they could become the most streamlined department, with the best manufacturing process.
Steven smiled and asked, "So when can you look at my tools and find all this waste?"
Daniel responded, "The first thing we are going to do is eliminate all of your meetings and weekly reviews."
Steven was in shock. He did not know what to say. "But, but, but. We need these to understand our tools and report out issues."
Daniel interrupted. "That is your waste. You are doing extra work for these reviews, when you can go down to the floor and respond directly to issues."
Daniel paused a moment and finally said, "You are causing all of this waste; we need to rethink how we review things and come back with something effective that everyone benefits from, not just you."
7.1 Reducing Waste in Meetings
Every day, more than 83 million people attend 11.5 million meetings. (Center for Student Leadership, 2013) That is a very high number of people, every day, attending a meeting.Lean experts consider about 90 percent are wasteful time spent in meetings. About 10 percent of the meeting has actual value to it. (M., 2012)
You can identify waste happening during the meeting, and work to eliminate it. Observe the actions during the meeting with the following:
- The meeting must have a goal and try to accomplish something. If the meeting does not have a purpose, then it is waste.
- Time the length of your meetings. No meeting should run over an hour, or it is just too long. According to author, Mike Wroblewski, the longest meetings last before people's attention wanders is 20 minutes. (Wroblewski, 2006)
- Avoid the history lesson. Do not have the team repeat past history about the issue or problem you are trying to solve.
- Avoid recapping any topic. According to Mike Wroblewski: "How many meetings have you attended that someone shows up considerably late, and the meeting leader stops the current discussion to go back and recap what has happened so far in this meeting, for that person?" (Wroblewski, 2006)
- Limit attendance of the meetings. If there is someone who does not need to be present at the meeting, then this is wasteful keeping him or her there.
- Start and stop on time. If you are late, or people are late to the meeting and you have recap, or run late into someone's meeting, this is waste.
- The chair allows members to argue, and recaps their argument, or goes off on a tangent about a subject not related to the issue at hand. This is definitely a wasteful use of time.
- Look at the audiovisual and presentation. Is the presentation direct, straight to the point; does it attack the issue? Does the presentation have jumbled text, or slides that don't mean anything? This is Muda.
- Does the meeting notice clearly show the topics? Does everyone know exactly who is responsible for the action items? If not, this is waste.
- Does the meeting notice a clearly defined time and location where the meeting will take place? Is it easy to see, so that you can find the conference room at the right place and time? If not, then this becomes waste, because people lose time looking for the room.
There are many different observations of waste when attending meetings; be sure to identify them and write them down. Present these findings to the chair and leadership offline, and suggest improvements to save time.
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