I was speaking with a good friend who works for a large advertising firm. We were talking about the potential for travel as there were projects requiring attention at the head office.

We talked about the fact that most things could be done remotely and travel might not be as frequent as initially thought. I was surprised by the statement “Well they like to have meetings and I have to be at them”

“Did you say they like to have meetings?” I recanted immediately as I figure the only people who like to have meetings are mid level public employees.

“Yes, they like to have good communications” ….. I went a bit silent …

Does the fact that you attend a lot of meetings mean you have good communications? I think that it is safe to say no.

Meeting Cost
I am not going to say that all meetings are totally useless …. But a good majority are. The way I look at it you can calculate the value of a meeting based upon this comparison.

(People x hrs x wage) + (opportunity cost) + (meeting fixed cost ) = true meeting cost

How much do your meetings cost your company? Ok so now that you have a grasp on how much that costs your company. Do you really need to meet as much? Are there things that you might not have to meet about? Do we really need to meet to discuss ideas? Or should we be saving the meeting for the decision and final debate on something?

When are you going to do your real job?
I have yet to meet a person who’s sole job it is to meet. But yet I have met many people who spend the majority of their time meeting. How many times have you heard this “I am in meetings all day” my response is always when are you going to do your job? When you look at the average persons day, throwing a scheduled meeting into the mix takes away from what they need to accomplish on a day-to-day basis.

Arranging Schedules
This is possibly the biggest pain in the ass. Trying to coordinate a time that works for all the people in the group. This problem further compounds when there are multiple time zones involved.

So do you really need to schedule that meeting to look at concepts for your new marketing materials?
The fine folks over at Flash Café understand this and have summed it up nicely in this excerpt from their article about ConceptShare.

“How do you run it? I often wonder how anything gets done in some creative design spheres, what with busy schedules, egos, and uninformed clients all clouding the process. A good producer understands that his creative vision is no greater than that of the workability or outcome of the project. Feedback is king and getting that feedback can be very frustrating, so how does an artist communicate best with those who must doll out the feedback? Look no further than ConceptShare.” – Flash Café

How ConceptShare helps
We detest meetings. So we do our best to save you from their time wasting energy sucking paths. As the guys and gals over at the Flash Café point out Feedback is king and people are busy! While conceptshare facilitates both synchronous and asynchronous communications our clients find the ability to manage multiple projects with asynchronous workspaces to be the biggest benefit

We facilitate the project not the meeting. When a project is started a workspace is created and this becomes the center of visual communication for the project life. It allows the members of that project to review and give feedback on their own time. Why is this important?

Because time is the one thing that we can’t buy or trade.

If you find yourself in meeting about visual elements please give us a shout or try it for your self. You will see that you can make your schedule less cluttered and find that meetings are reserved for decision making not design debate.

Cheers

Scott

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