Meetings can be productive, if the right agenda and framework is in place to allow it to be productive. Most of the time, meetings are not very productive, even if it has great intentions of being productive, it often goes stale with little engagement.
The overriding factor that I have experience on why meetings are not productive, goes further back then the meeting itself. It is the time for which it plans to be conducted. Most times, these meetings are almost impromptu or have very little forenotice between the time of the meeting and the time it was disseminated. This just about ruins most of the attendees’ schedule, as they already had other plans with their time, so their emotional state is one of inconvenience. But since these meetings are scheduled by supervisors and quick impromptu meetings have a sense of importance or urgency behind them, then everyone feels compelled to attend.
Once in a great while, these meetings have an important announcement to make or stand down of some kind that really do require the full attention of the staff. But most meetings is to reiterate old tired rhetoric of metric standards that were missed or going the wrong direction, and the real reason the meeting is taking place, is because the senior leadership of the supervisor was told that he/she needed to ‘deliver a message’ and to find out what they can do different.
This is when talking in circles start to happen. They ask for ideas on how we can ‘improve’ a certain metric or to get the direct reports to comply with an initiative that is slow to be adapted, but the ideas everyone shares is recycled ideas that uses carrots or sticks of some kind. Nothing new comes out of it, but to the supervisor, they did their task by having the meeting, but no one learned anything new.
Meeting can be productive, but the only way it can be productive is that someone or everyone in attendance learns something new. The real goal of meetings is to learn something new, either through discussions and brainstorming or through disseminating information to the broader group. When it becomes an exercise of compliance, then it has no real value.
