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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, September 14, 2009

Stay on track to avoid wasting time at office meetings


By Anita Bruzzese

In the last seven years, Phil Gerbyshak figures he has spent three to five hours a day every workday in a meeting. Of that time, he figures 25 percent of that time was well spent.

"Doing business face to face is so important, but we're always waiting for people, or we start meetings late or there's all this personal chat and sidebar conversations," says Gerbyshak, vice president for a financial services company in Milwaukee. "I'm always sitting there thinking about all the things my team could be doing instead of wasting so much time."

Meetings have always been the bane of any workplace, but with a leaner work force now being asked to take on more tasks, the time spent in meetings is even more precious to time-strapped workers.

At the same time, workers don't want to miss the important "face time" with bosses that meetings can give them, especially when they need a strong connection to the boss to hang on to their jobs.

Bill Lampton, a motivational speaker and communications coach in Atlanta, says he gets "enraged" when a committee chair says the meeting attendees need to wait "for a couple of important members who are not here yet."

"Strange, but I thought I was an important member myself," Lampton says. "Imagine that 12 people wait 10 minutes for the late arrivals. That's 120 minutes, or two hours totally wasted."

Mike Song, a productivity speaker, says many meeting problems could be solved with a few tweaks.

"When you schedule meetings back to back, you're going to have meeting dominoes. One runs late, and then that throws all of them off. Instead of scheduling them to last 60 minutes, you schedule them to last 50 minutes, and that gives you time to get to the next one," he says.

Gerbyshak says meetings often bog down when agendas are misplaced, which Song says can be solved by sending agendas electronically so that it can be easily accessed via a laptop or Blackberry or iPhone when needed. "Now the agenda is strapped to your hip," Song says. "No more waiting around."

Lampton says he wishes more meeting chairs would stop meetings from stretching out to "ghastly limits" by allowing "motormouths" to ramble on and on. Song says he calls these people "Ted Tangents" who need to be put on the spot by the chair noting that the speaker has moved off topic.

"Then, he asks Ted Tangent, 'Is this topic more urgent or important?' than what is on the agenda?" Song says. "Nine out of 10 times it's not more important, and Ted starts to realize he's going off into la-la land."

In a new book with Vicki Halsey and Tim Burress called "The Hamster Revolution for Meetings: How to Meet Less and Get More Done," (Berrett-Koehler, $19.95), Song gives some other tips for meetings:

  • Have a meeting objective. "This is what we call an 'objenda.' You might say you want to increase sales 22 percent," he says. "But you want it to be specific, and action-oriented."

  • Be early. "Five minutes early should be the new on time," Song says. "If you try and be on time, something is always going to delay you like traffic or a phone call. Most people are late because they plan to be on time. Make being early part of your team brand." He suggests making it clear that key information will be covered first, and tardiness is unacceptable.

  • Use more mini-meet-

    ings. Sometimes a five- or 10-minute meeting is all that is needed. Hold it standing up to enforce the time limit.

  • Nail it down. If a follow-up meeting is needed, don't adjourn until a specific date and time is selected for it. This helps avoid endless telephone calls or e-mails at a later date trying to get participants to agree on a time.

    While Gerbyshak is an avid social media user, he says he believes that the medium isn't the "be all and end all" of communication.

    "You've still got to have face-to-face meetings to get business done," he says. "Those discussions are critical."