The cost of management meetings and avoiding wastage of man hours unnecessarily

In today’s office environment, meetings with top leadership, management, colleagues, customers, partners or subordinates may necessitate you to go to the next cabin, another building or even to some other state or another corner of the world. All these trips, if unnecessary, cause a huge blow to the company’s finance and employees’ crucial man hours.

If the corporate meetings are important for business, they also kill crucial man hours. Even though you know the skills of good time management, it can be difficult during office hours, especially when one has to work around other people’s meeting schedules. Therefore, just for the reason that some one has to organise a face to face meeting, not only does a horde of the company’s pounds get spent, the meaningful work hours get wasted.

How meeting cause wastage of man hours?

Attending the meetings which are not necessary for you is a classic example of wasting time unnecessarily at office. Statistics showing the number of meetings that are organised with the people who are not required to be there are astonishing. They make one wonder, how much time people waste like this? How much crucial time and the planning for that goes wasted with these unnecessary meetings?

Here arises the problem that one cannot express his or her desire to avoid a meeting or get it cancelled on the whole because it may offend the boss or a colleague. It may also upset the whole work schedule of the person who is attempting to schedule the meeting?

In the present times, when everyone is suffering from the problem of overwork, the meetings which last too long and are actually unnecessary prove to be the wastage of time and money. According to a recent survey held by New York Times, some companies are finding out ways to reduce their meetings in size. The survey encompassed about 613 workers of an office team, about more than one-fourth of respondents choosing to reduce the number of meetings.

The computer software company IBM became so focussed about how to avoid the unnecessary meetings that they made it mandatory for the top leadership not to approve any unscheduled meetings. The decision came after their estimation that about more than thirty thousand members of the sales force were spending six hours a week on an average, while preparing for or attending meetings. The sales persons were given directions that they just needed to have one meeting a week with their manager for coaching.

Ways to avoid meetings that waste money and man hours

Online meetings

Today the advancement in technology has helped organize online meetings. This has proved to be a boon for all those who have to travel extensively to attend meeting which do not matter to them. It provides the organisation’s team an ability to not only meet the bosses or colleagues online, but also to share documents, applications, display web pages and organise polls. The ability to facilitate meetings online, with the same effectiveness of speaking and getting replies immediately at a fraction of the otherwise cost, has made online meetings a huge hit.

You can make your choice out of several online meeting solutions, such as e-mail chat software, video conferencing, web conferencing, tele conferencing and other online collaboration tool. Selecting the right solution that fits your needs is based upon several different factors, such as the number of participants in the meeting, or on the multimedia materials that you desire to have. Also, for the online meetings you need to plan everything in advance. The success of meetings also depends on the technology resources present for the participants of meetings.

You can also rely on complete software of online meetings, such as, Microsoft. Such software provides whole technology solutions for web conferencing that one can use in the office to organise meetings with both large and small groups, sitting at any corner of the world.

The Microsoft Windows Messenger can connect the team members directly with their colleagues all over the world through text chat, voice and video. This messenger also comes with other features that make your virtual meeting even more comfortable. You can auto select Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 to display more than one time zone to have the ability of scheduling the meetings accurately with your global colleagues.

However, one has to be completely careful while opting for online meetings. A web meeting is not a substitute for other kinds of meeting, particularly the face to face meetings. The main blunder that the small businesses usually make is assuming that the new online fast and affordable technology can actually reduce their travel expenses.

After you have had a web meeting, you may realise at the end that probably you should have had a face to face meeting. It is also not so easy to have high quality web conferencing software. You may make mistakes in selecting one or your other office may not have the same features that your messenger has. An unsuccessful web meeting can cause you severe losses in business and sales. For example, a sales presentation may not be so efficient online as it can be face to face. Also, if you are addressing your staff in an online meeting, its failure may cause lost productivity to the organisation.

Do you waste a lot of your working day in boring, mindless meetings? If so, read on to find out how you can make your meetings into productive and worthwhile events. Honestly!

Sean McPheat provides management training programs to small, medium and large businesses. Visit Sean’s free management course for management training tips and advice.

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