Collaboration has been getting a good deal of press recently. One Harvard Business Review (HBR) article in particular raised some points I’d like to address. I’m referencing ‘Collaboration Overload’ from the January-February issue of HBR by Rob Cross, Reb Rebele and Adam Grant.
Eye catching were a couple data points:
- According to data the authors have collected over the past two decades, “the time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more.”
- At many companies the time spent in meetings, on the phone and responding to emails “hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own.”
Let’s take this data as complete. (I haven’t had a chance to drill down into the analyses made: data collection, sample size and methodology, or size and location of the 300 organizations researched—global? US only?)
First let’s tackle the issue of too many meetings. How many of you are thrilled when a meeting cancels? Don’t we almost do a back flip of joy because we just got 30 minutes or an hour of our life back? The HBR article mentions a company who stopped recurring meetings for 2 weeks and after that break decided to make sure each meeting had an owner and an agenda. Agreed, I applaud that! And, let’s take that a step further:
Don’t accept any meeting invitation that does not have both a purpose statement and an agenda! (I assume the person who called the meeting owns it.) What are you expected to do in the meeting: make a decision? Brainstorm solutions? Troubleshoot a problem? BTW, you can reply nicely when these items aren’t present in the invite: Tentative, what is the purpose of the meeting and what should I be prepared to discuss?
One of my long-term clients has a wonderful, nice culture. They are a pleasure to work with because everyone is so nice. Nice comes at a cost. They accept meeting invites without a purpose or agenda, because the invite arrived in their Inbox! After replying as I suggest above, and ideally receiving a purpose statement and an agenda, ask yourself:
- Am I the right person to attend this meeting? Is someone else a better representative?
- Have all the right people been invited, given the purpose of the meeting?
- Does this require a face-to-face and/or online (Skype for Business, for example) meeting? Or could this be handled via email?
- Will this meeting help me meet my quarterly or annual goals?
- Does this align with our strategic priorities?
- Does this draw on my strengths and interests?
The above are example questions from one of the 7 categories of questions that I teach in the Discover Your Best Thinking with Precision Q+A workshop developed by Vervago.
So, what can you do to spend collaboration time wisely, allowing more time for your critical work?
- Count up how many hours you spent in meetings last week.
- Apply my suggestions above to meetings you have scheduled next week.
- Hint: look at each and if there is no purpose or agenda, follow-up with “tentative” and ask for those items.
- And/or ask yourself the bulleted list of questions above to determine if you should accept the invitation or not.
- Do the math: compare the time spent in meetings for the week before you implemented these suggestions and the week you do implement them.
Think about the time and money you would save if your whole team implemented these ideas? Entire organization? I had a client whose whole team took the Discover Your Best Thinking with Precision Q+A workshop together about 5 years ago. As a result, “instead of our meetings going overtime, we’re now finished in about 45 minutes!” Let’s do some simple math on that statement: A team of 8 saving 15 minutes out of one meeting gives the team 2 hours back! What could your team do with that time?
In upcoming blog posts, I’ll discuss some other practical collaboration solutions to save you more time and more money.
Let me know how these tips work for you. I’d love to hear from you and am happy to answer questions. Email me at [email protected]