Driving Effective Company Meetings

Too many ad hoc meetings can be a sign of poor management

I often hear people say that they hate meetings. It is however very hard to see how we can run a coordinated company effort without them, for example to exchange information, discuss and prioritise. Meetings take a lot of valuable resources and it is vital to strive for good use of time.

In post C19 times, with employees physically more dispersed, the importance of effective collaboration in companies has nothing but increased. We have less opportunity to communicate informally, when we do not meet physically, by the coffee machine, during lunch or other meetings.

In his excellent book High Output Management, Mr. Andy Grove former Chairman and CEO of Intel, gave a good basic framework around meetings. He defined two types of meetings: The first type being process oriented, taking place on a regular schedule. The second being ad hoc, typically to solve urgent problems. Mr. Grove argued that a:

“…real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.”

It is an interesting management exercise to check the proportion of ad hoc meetings during your work week schedule. If they are more than 25%, it is a sign of poor management in your company, according to Mr. Grove.

As a CEO I used these insights to drive towards more effective meetings, focusing on increasing the process-oriented relative to ad hoc meetings.

To implement we first reviewed the structure of process meetings, involving different kind of regular meetings, from committee meetings as the management board to department meetings, cross divisional meetings or even one on one meetings. The structure of these process-oriented meetings should at each time mirror where there is regular need to meet and collaborate within the company.

After having the right structure of reoccurring process meetings in place we implemented the change, by always trying to push the request for ad hoc meetings to the next process meeting.

To my experience, usually, a request for an ad hoc meeting could be postponed until the next scheduled process meeting. This type of implementation leads to a decrease in the number of ad hoc meetings, more efficient process meetings and better use of time.

My feeling is that the insights of Andy Grove on good structure around meetings within companies is still relevant today. Especially when members of organisations meet less within the same physical premises but need to be super coordinated and efficient as ever before.