I’m notorious for leaving meetings that run over time. In my opinion, anything that is important should be discussed within the agreed upon timeframe. We spend far too much time, scheduling, being in, and following up meetings. It’s not just me, there are a lot of us who share the same train of thought – many of us who are not a fan of settings that should have been an email.

Here are some interesting statistics for you from booqed.com:

• The majority (around 83%) of employees will spend up to 33% of their workweek in meetings!
• There are around 55 million meetings held each week in the United States. That’s at least 11 million per day and over 1 billion per year.
• The average employee spends at least 3 hours a week in meetings. 30% of workers report that they spend over 5 hours per week in meetings.
• Time spent in meetings has been rising by 8% to 10% every year since 2000.
• Organizations spend around 15% of their time in meetings. Surveys show that 71% of those meetings are unproductive.
• Unproductive meetings cause around $37 billion to be lost per year.

If those statistics don’t force you to think twice about scheduling yet another meeting, I don’t know what would. However, don’t throw in the towel and completely do away with ALL meetings just yet. Meetings are important. They make sure that you and your team are all on the same page and accountable for your part in the bigger task or project. You can make sure that meetings are useful and productive for all parties involved if you follow these three rules:

1. Quality Over Quantity
What points in the task or project are extremely critical to you and your team? If you said the beginning or the end, then you are correct. These points in a task or project lifecycle are usually the points when meeting with the team are important. Other milestones or decision points also make it worth getting together. The rest, you can probably send as an email.

2. Flexibility
Canceling, postponing or moving up a meeting should all be options to keep in mind as the task or project evolves. Meetings are important because you all want to get from point A to point B and be as aligned as you can along the way. However, the frequency of your meetings should not be carved in stone. If you can keep updates via a project board, chat thread, email, or internal wiki – then by all means, do that.

3. Compromise
The most important aspect to teamwork is compromise. With regard to meetings, distributed and remote teams have it harder than in-house teams. Asynchronous global organizations spend much time trying to figure out a convenient time to talk. This is part of the digital, flexible, work from anywhere reality. So there will always be a part of the team that has to compromise – and it can’t be the same group each time.

What are some of your hard and fast meeting rules? Share them with us in the comments. Remember to work smart and be a blessing to someone today. Stay safe and healthy!

Written by Jaie O. TheHelp