I have heard this more and more often. Huge demands for productivity in meetings, but less and less time allotted to them. Here is a story of a team’s discovery about the impact of taking time to prepare a meeting.

A company department with strict productivity rules had sent a whole team to be trained in facilitation, one day per week for 2 weeks.  It came up during the first day of the course that they had very long, unproductive team meetings. 

At the end of the first day of the course, during the discussion on how to implement the focused conversation method they had just learned, they expressed dismay that it took time to prepare for a productive meeting.  They mentioned that there was not time in their job descriptions to prepare for meetings, and there was strict accountabilility for their time.  So I asked when their next meeting was scheduled – it was in a few days, before our next session. I suggested that one of them sneak in an hour to prepare a conversation for the meeting, and then facilitate it. 

The next week when we met, they were ecstatic!  “Our meetings of 10 people usually last 2 hours and rarely have any good results.  This time we used the conversation that was prepared, the meeting took only 1 hour, and we had very good results and decisions for moving forward.  We saved 10 person hours of time with 1 person hour of preparation!  We can make a business case for adding meeting preparation to our job descriptions, because we have demonstrated productivity!”