No more meetings Please

It's over a month I have joined my new company, but I have spent around 24 hours (3 work days) attending meetings/telecasts [just the official group ones]. I get at least a couple of meeting requests/delegations every day. I have a feeling that if someone sneezes, there will be a meeting where the speaker will say “It's important to understand our objectives for the year 2010 and align it with the process of sneezing”. I just wait when the speaker will complete so that I can get out of there. But I am not so lucky, once the speaker stops, he is flooded with the usual questions. These question never change or its mostly not relevant to the purpose of the meeting. The audience who ask these questions have a strange behavior, they ask question only when we have something urgent to do or when the speaker is about to wind-up like showing the chocolate put not giving it. It's over my threshold and hence thought I will blog regarding these frustrating meetings.

Facts:

1. Every Knowledge Sharing session is best accomplished when scoped to a small group say a strength of 20 – 30 people.

2. Human capacity for observation is 30 to 45 min.

3. When met in a large group, people pay more attention to other people around them than to what the speaker says.

These are the facts that everyone know. Now I have few questions,

WTH do we have meetings for all the employees, which means for a group of 400 – 500 people (in my case), clearly there is very less we understand from the knowledge shared.

Why are the meetings for few hours? I just cannot focus on whats going on for so long. I tend to sleep or start looking at people around me.

Why do they repeat the same stuff again and again and again? Every meeting says, Lets understand our objectives of year 2010. I am tired of hearing there words.

I believe there are many other questions popping in the heads of every frustrated meeting attendees. There is a need for a re-engineering in the method of conducting the meeting. Few changes I will expect are

1. Conduct all employee meetings only when they are highly important

2. The general updates can be shared as a mail or through the managers

3. Conducting meeting whenever people come from other offices should be optional. Reason: I rarely understand his accent and He is also going to repeat the same

4. Listening to Conference calls is very irritating, same reason I just cant understand what they say and many times there is lot of disturbance in the call

5. Repeating of the same information should be avoided, because once I knows its the repeated topic I just stop listening

6. When a meeting is conducted say 1 hour, it is not just 1 hour, 10 – 15 min it may get delayed, 10 -15 min for people to commute, 10 – 30 min a small discussion about the meeting or a break after meeting. There is an addendum of 45 min to 1 hr. So meeting spoils the nearly 2 hrs of the effective work time

7. Phones should be kept in silent mode and bring laptops to take down notes should be avoided. Sometimes I just hear the jamming of the keys in the laptop or bizarre ring-tones.

Final Word: I am a person who hates meeting. Many people love meetings. If you are one of those please pardon.

Please vote the poll "What is the most frustrating part in an Employee Meeting?"