Managers put hours into arranging meetings

They’re rarely informative and often tedious, and they take valuable time out of the day — hours when managers and employees could be producing and earning revenue.

But a new report shows that some of the biggest meeting-related productivity drains happen before workers even set foot in the conference room.

The study, conducted by LM Research & Marketing Consultancy in London for online scheduling service Doodle.com, found that administrators and managers spend an average of 4.8 hours a week just scheduling meetings — a time count that doesn’t even include attending the get-togethers. Nearly a quarter of the poll’s respondents said they needed seven hours or more each week to arrange get-togethers. Long before the meeting began, half an hour went into planning a given powwow, the survey found. In all, the majority of respondents spend roughly six working weeks a year putting together formal corporate gatherings.

Businesses surveyed said they were scheduling a weekly average of nine meetings with seven people.

Some locals say Doodle’s numbers sound a little low (maybe because, in addition to professionals in the United States, the 1,500-participant survey also included the French, who work roughly four hours a day, and the Germans, who have about 150 days a year of vacation, plus daily beer breaks).

Jonathan Fine owns several area businesses, including PBR Rock Bar and Grill, the Rockhouse bar and security company Sting Surveillance, and he suspects some of his managers spend as many as six to seven hours a week scheduling and preparing for meetings.

By those standards, David Stone seems to have caught a bit of a break,

Stone is owner and president of Nevada Association Services, a Las Vegas agency that collects on past-due accounts for homeowners associations. Stone cops to anywhere from seven to nine meetings of five to 20 participants a week, though he said assembling such face time takes him just three hours of planning and scheduling. Spend more time than that, he said, and you should consider whether you’re “having meetings just to have meetings.”

Executives and experts say there are more efficient ways to plan, though.

Right now, 64 percent of meeting planners schedule their get-togethers via e-mail or desktop calendars, the survey found. Twenty-one percent use phone calls, while 14 percent use online calendars. Just 1 percent use specialized, Internet-based scheduling tools such as Doodle, which syncs up Microsoft Outlook calendars with the calendars of people’s e-mail contacts to check meeting availability before administrators set schedules.

To save time, the Doodle folks, of course, say you should use Doodle, because real-time access to others’ calendars can cut scheduling time from 30 minutes to 15 minutes per meeting.

Locals offered other, lower-tech tips as well.

Mateo Reyes, general manager of PBR Rock Bar and Grill, said it’s tough to get all hands on deck for the four to five meetings a week he needs to hold. His supervisors typically work a minimum of 50 hours a week, and pinning them all down at one time isn’t easy. So Reyes simply holds his meetings at the same hour every day and week. That lets attendees know when they’re expected, without Reyes having to spend one minute calling people together.

Stone, whose company uses e-mail and desktop calendars to call workers to meetings, said he’s trying to cut back on such events altogether, conducting more business by phone and e-mail.

“I’m prioritizing issues. Is it that important that it needs to be addressed right now, or can it wait until we do weekly staff meetings? Not everything is important, and not every issue is meeting-worthy just because I think about it,” Stone said. “Earlier in my career, I used to think that if it seemed important to me, it had to be important to everybody instantaneously. That’s just not the case.”

Stone said he’s also more carefully evaluating his attendance lists, determining before scheduling begins whether he can pare his invite list to just a few key people.

Or you could take the more draconian strategy Fine’s mulling: “My next business will have no managers or employees. That way, we won’t have to have any meetings.”

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at
jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512.