Describe (in detail) an example of unproductive business meeting you have attended.

• What should have been done prior to the meeting to increase productivity?
• As an attendee, what could you have done during the meeting to increase productivity?
• What was the lost opportunity?
• How would you measure the cost of low productivity?

React to the post of another student. “Me, too” responses are not graded.

Part of my role at work is to not only attend meetings, but to schedule and facilitate them as well. My audiences range from team members in our office to those who are 10.5 hours ahead around the globe.

I remember attending a meeting of a team member who was not prepared. There wasn’t an agenda nor did the key players attend. The timing of the meeting was inconvenient as well since it was called during the typical lunch hour. The purpose of the meeting was to finalize the plan for a scheduled outage over the upcoming weekend. Time was of the essence.

To increase productivity, the facilitator should have provided an agenda, confirmed that each key player accepted, and reiterated via email the importance of the upcoming event. As an attendee, my suggestion was to give people their lunch hour back and reconvene at a later time that day when all parties confirmed availability. The lost opportunity was both business and personal for the attendees, we lost most of a lunch hour waiting for others and we did not accomplish our goal of scheduling tasks for the event.

The cost of loss productivity goes much further than just time wasted. Let’s take efficiency for example. You can be working all day, but if you’re not working efficiency, that’s a loss of productivity. What about wasting time on others to provide you data. For example, if you’re working on a project and the client changes a requirement. Now you’re left waiting on updated documentation which impacts your capacity and upcoming deadlines. Loss of productivity can impact the bottom line with both hard and soft (hard = dollars, soft = hours) impacts. Not to mention the employee morale that is impacted when they’re not meeting their own objectives.