Love them or hate them, internal meetings are so ingrained into our working lives that it seems as though we’d be lost without them. Regardless of how much we actually need them, we hold meetings for so many different occasions – we’ve even heard of people having internal meetings about meetings!
Granted, communication is important in any place of work but is a full blown meeting always necessary? We have cause to believe the contrary; meetings may not be as necessary as you believe them to be but they’re probably a lot pricier than you may think when you take into account the hourly pay of each participant.
It would be unwise to scrap meetings from your business completely so we’re not suggesting that you do so, however there are some things that you can do to minimise any money wastage. First of all, ensuring that everyone who attends the meeting actually needs to be there is essential. Having members of staff whose time could be better spent elsewhere attend the meeting is just burning money which could be invested into other things.
Similarly, try to make sure that you have a strict agenda for each meeting you hold. Knowing what needs to be discussed when and in what order is monumental for optimising the overall productivity of your meeting and making sure that everything you need to talk about gets covered.
Before you hold a meeting, you should always question yourself to make sure that a meeting is the right answer. Ask yourself whether the discussion would be better suited to email or if you could carry out the conversation with your team on instant messaging platforms such as Slack.
As a boss, you may feel as though you have to hold a certain number of meetings per week or month in order to keep your company ticking over nicely but, in reality, you may be putting too much emphasis on the importance they actually have on the productivity of your company.
It mustn't be overlooked that meetings are important for the overall well being of both employees and staff so they shouldn’t be disregarded altogether, but it is worth thinking about exactly how much money your company is wasting in order to put together a discussion which may (1) be unnecessary to hold in a meeting format and (2) not really require all of the attendees to be present for the entire duration.
Meetings sometimes go off topic. Meetings sometimes go on longer than necessary. Some meetings don’t even require all of the attendees to be there. When these things happen, your company is essentially burning its budget, so it brings up the question: have you ever thought about how much meetings are costing your company?
You no longer have to wonder because Silverdoor Apartments have created a new tool which allows you to calculate exactly how much internal meetings are costing your company over the course of a week and a year. You can try it out for yourself here.
