Tortured by meetings

by Sejla Rahimic | Apr 16, 2020 | Why MeetingScience?

MOST workers view the prospect of a two-hour meeting with the same enthusiasm as Prometheus awaited the daily arrival of the eagle, sent by the gods to peck at his liver. Meetings have been a form of torture for office staff for as long as they have pushed pencils and bashed keyboards.

One eternal problem has been their inefficiency. In 1957, C. Northcote Parkinson, an academic and legendary writer on management, came up with the law of triviality, that “the time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.”

Fumbling Toward (Remote? Flexible? Hybrid? Office?) Ecstasy

You are not part of the first company nor the last to try and solve the post-pandemic 'how do we really work now?' problem of 2022 and beyond. Here are three recent articles on how different companies manage (or not) the transition (or not): 1) Bloomberg - Employees...

The (Not So) Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days

Could you reduce your meetings to zero meetings per week? Could that outweigh the perceived benefits of social interaction and cohesion? And how about productivity and stress? Determining these outcomes was the objective of a recent study published in MIT Sloan. In...

The Ultimate Guide to Meeting Agendas

95% of meetings need agendas, period. The science on this is clear. Unfortunately, too often we see the opposite to be true, namely, that on average, just 5% of meetings have agendas for the average meeting attendee (or organizer). While disheartening, it's not...

Timing May In Fact Be Everything

Daniel Pink, the best-selling author of the newly released The Power of Regret, published another New York Times best-selling book in 2018 titled When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing. In that book, he reveals, through meticulous research, that, among other...

Working from home by choice or necessity? The upsides and downsides of hybrid work

According to a new report from the Pew Research Foundation, more (American) workers prefer to work from home and will continue to do so if given the choice. Among the report's highlights: Most (64%) of those who are now working from home at least some of the time but...