The Great Debate: Meetings VS. Emails
There is a time for all things. A time to laugh, a time to cry, a time to be happy, and a time to be sad. There is also a time for meetings and a time for emails.
Now we all know that at least 99% of meetings could be an email. This is of course a gross exaggeration, but if you took offense to that, you might be pro-meeting. I however, and severely anti-meeting.
Now that isn’t to say that meetings can’t be productive. A good meeting can be far more beneficial than an email, but there are a lot of things to consider:
Does everyone on your team, or even the majority of your team do better in a group setting?
Do you have a meeting agenda and does it require a group to sit down and collectively solve an issue?
Are you scheduling a meeting just to hear yourself talk?
These are good questions to consider, and they reflect on a lot of the meetings that I have sat through in the past. Again, I am by no means speaking negatively of all meetings. Group settings have a lot of benefits such as:
Being an open forum for discussion
Sparking new and creative ideas
Resolving issues quickly and avoiding being lost in an email thread or an inter-office chat
The key point here is that a good meeting should be concise and serve to create new ideas or introduce problems that can be more easily solved in a group setting.
Let’s talk about the first point, conciseness. I have a personal rule. No meeting should be longer than 30 minutes.
Again, this may not apply to every business meeting, but it is something to keep in mind. After 30 minutes, most people’s attention starts to waver. This makes employees and leadership less productive. In fact, it brings to mind a story.
I once sat through two all day sessions at an organization.
Bleh.
After the first day, my team was mentally exhausted. All we wanted to do was go back to the hotel and rest up. And that was only halfway through the first day. We got up the next morning feeling completely unprepared to sit through another 6 hours of meetings, but the show must go on.
As we neared the end of the second day, there were about 30 minutes left in the last session. I could feel that things were wrapping up, all the questions had been answered, leadership teams were starting to repeat themselves, and no new ideas had come forth in the last hour. As such, we attempted to wrap things up to give ourselves and everyone else a little time back in the day.
No such luck.
The person in charge of the meetings stopped our attempts stating, “We still have thirty minutes left.”
30 minutes to do what? There was nothing else to cover. However, instead of realizing it, this person proceeded to pontificate for the next half hour, going over everything we had already discussed and merely repeating what was in all of our notes.
Now in my opinion, those whole two days could have been drastically cut short. There was nothing new that I learned on the second day, despite my best efforts. My notes had stopped after lunch on the first day, and from then on I knew we were all in for a slog.
But our fearless meeting leader pushed on, ignoring all the road signs of unproductiveness all in the name of filling out our time slot.
It makes me wonder, why?
Why do managers and leaders feel the need to use every last minute of a scheduled meeting time when the end result is clearly unproductive? Wouldn’t it be better for employees and team members to use the remaining time to work on important tasks and possibly even accelerate the outcome of what was discussed in the meeting?
How can a manager make unproductive meeting time productive?
Once topics become repeated or ideas seem at a standstill, it's time for a break. It may mean scheduling a follow up meeting. It may also mean assigning some homework to the team to get everyone thinking creatively at their own pace to solve any problems left unresolved after the meeting.
This is where tools like Google Docs come in really handy. I like to make a shared document where the whole team can brainstorm ideas. Then, we can schedule a follow up call or meeting to narrow down our ideas. This gives everyone a chance to come up with ideas on their own schedule in a way that feels more individually productive.
What does this mean for the decision between a meeting and an email?
The first step to this decision comes from knowing your team. Is your team comprised mainly of people who work well together and who tend to come up with better ideas in a group, in-person/virtual setting? Is your team composed of team members who prefer to fly solo and come up with ideas on their own time? Is your team a mixture of both?
Meetings work great for some people, and not so great for others. Chances are, your organization is filled with both types of people. That’s why I will always recommend the follow up email strategy. Have a meeting. Bring your team together to collaborate and form ideas, but remember to keep it as brief as is productive. Afterwards, provide an opportunity for those other team members to collaborate in a way that feels more productive to them.
Nobody wants to sit through a long drawn out meeting, and anyone who says they do is either lying or crazy (you will never convince me otherwise). So let’s all save ourselves the trouble. Let’s focus less on the length of a meeting and more on overall productivity.
Thanks for reading. I hope you’ve enjoyed the musings of the Sparkle Team Blog. If you’ve got a good example of some marketing that didn’t exactly sparkle, send us an email and we’ll get your story featured in the blog. And I promise not to ask for a meeting.
-STB
