What happens when you do UX research on meeting culture?
The human centric reason why meetings suck and what you can do about it!
This blog post is part of a series where we explore the effects on poor meeting culture in organisations and what you and your organisation can do to improve. More parts will come, sign up for our newsletter to stay tuned.
If you personally didn't call for the last meeting you were in, there is a pretty big chance you had very little to do with it until it showed up in your inbox. Imagine the last meeting you got invited to, and think about these easy questions:
- Was there a clear purpose of what was expected to be achieved during the meeting?
- Were there a timed agenda with actions to drive towards that goal?
Going against the grain, for the purpose of this article, let’s assume that you answered all of those questions with a yes - congratulations your meeting is one of only 37% (State of Meetings 2019). More importantly, did everyone who was in that meeting need to be there in order to drive each of the actions towards the goal? Did anyone have to sit through a lot of what was irrelevant to them before getting to their actions? Did you have to be there? Did you want to be there or was it a waste of your time?
These are some of the questions explored in a research study conducted recently where hundreds of data points were collected and compared with a bulk of research by Elise Keith, Doodle, Smart Building Magazine, Ovum and many more. What was interesting with the research and why it is relevant to you was the exploration of the concept of a meeting journey.
In this series we will dig deeper into the aspects that can help you and your organisation to get a healthier meeting culture by looking at everything that happens from the moments before, all the way through and after a meeting. We will explore why so many meetings are deemed bad and even a waste of time (Peter Stark, Industry Week indicates 30% of your time)
Here are some of the topics that we will cover, do you identify?
- More and more meetings are held remote or “mixed” meaning one or several participants call in to a physical location with more than one participant.
- Most people hate meetings.
- Most people are not paying attention most of the time when they are in a meeting that they don’t like to be in.
Let us know what you think.