{"id":3318,"date":"2022-04-25T07:42:03","date_gmt":"2022-04-25T07:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/?p=3318"},"modified":"2022-04-25T07:42:03","modified_gmt":"2022-04-25T07:42:03","slug":"are-meetings-a-waste-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/are-meetings-a-waste-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"Are meetings a waste of time?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Statesman argues that meetings are a waste of time<\/a>. It looks at research on the effects of ‘no meetings’ policies and finds:<\/p>\n

Across all the companies in the study, the most beneficial results came when companies restricted meetings to two days per week. Holding good meetings is like swearing \u2013 \u201cthe more you do it, the more mundane it becomes\u201d. At the companies with more meeting-free days, \u201cmeetings were better structured\u2026 they wanted to not beat around the bush but come to the point, have an agenda \u2013 what we call \u2018meeting hygiene\u2019\u201d.<\/p>\n

As facilitators, we’re used to hearing meetings dismissed as pointless but (beneath the rhetorical headline) it’s clear that how we meet, and how often, has a big effect on the value. And whether we meet online or in-person can have a big impact.<\/p>\n

David Rock and Katherine Milan champion the value of online learning over in-person<\/a>. They suggest that although we may like the idea of meeting in person to learn, there are huge advantages to learning online – not least because it makes it easier to break the learning into chunks spread over time. It also lends itself to powerful, peer-to-peer learning rather than a hierarchical, sage-on-the-stage approach:<\/p>\n

But research shows the biggest factor in why people change is that they think other people are changing. Instead of a top-down model, we believe in an \u201ceveryone to everyone\u201d model. Using a virtual approach in far less time than it would take to wrangle top executives, the majority of 10,000 employees could be doing something new every week. With the half-life of many skills shrinking fast, virtual learning enables an entire company to change in weeks instead of years.<\/p>\n

Like everyone else, we’ve enjoyed some of the return to in-person meetings, but we’re also clear that there are some big advantages to online work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Statesman argues that meetings are a waste of time. It looks at research on the effects of ‘no meetings’ policies and finds: Across all the companies in the study, the most beneficial results came when companies restricted meetings to two days per week. Holding good meetings is like swearing \u2013 \u201cthe more you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3319,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3318"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3322,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3318\/revisions\/3322"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/creativefacilitation.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}