How much do ineffective and inefficient meetings cost your company?

The Cost of Ineffective and Inefficient Meetings

One of my favorite social channels is LinkedIn, it is a rich resource of articles that address all forms of business issues. Not the front of the refrigerator stuff, rather research, information that helps to better a business and a leader.

One of the best organizations to follow is the Center for Creative Leadership. An article posted in January caught my attention - How to Incorporate Storyboarding to Make Meetings More Efficient by Mary Shacklett (Jan 24,

2017) As leaders, we should always strive to demonstrate the best skills we want our staff to model. I recently asked for feedback from my staff and found out there was a request to keep our meetings to 45 minutes or less. This made sense to me, adult learners attention span is 45 minutes when in conferences, meetings, and business events.

The article shared a great tip to help get everyone in your organization on board with embracing efficiency by using a quick and through visual layout.

A 2015 survey conducted by the Center for Creative Leadership supported that overworked managers blamed their companies’ poor management processes rather than smartphones. This research was based on a survey where professionals, managers, and executives, reported interacting with work about 13.5 hours every workday.

How to these costs add up? Think of brainstorming sessions that get off track and can help managers keep the more open-ended and brainstorming meetings on track. Interestingly, this technique was first developed by Walt Disney employees in the early 1930s. The goal of the Disney storyboarding process was to collect all the best ideas from creatives and organize end-to-end story sequence on a board that everyone could see. As the brainstorming process continued to develop, frames were added and moved and a plot emerged that everyone could visualize. Once the storyboard was visualized, it could be tested to see if the story worked before expensive investments were made into graphics and production.

Utilizing this storyboard method in your own company is done in a slightly different method. Instead of a pre-published agenda, a meeting objective is created and brainstorming ideas posted. The group is tasked with organizing, adding and editing ideas to form the results. This organizational plan requires starting with a pilot meeting group to see what works well and didn’t.

A training component should be the next step to have your team learn the process and embrace how it will make the team more efficient. Lastly, remember to keep communication lines open for constructive criticism and feedback to improve the process.

What methods of keeping meetings on track work in your company? Share your suggestions that keep your team focused and result in substantive results that yield great deliverables.