SUMMARY: Instant gratification takes too long might be the motto of today’s consumer. When they want something they want it NOW and brands that take too long to respond are going to lose customers. To increase response time review your processes and stop having so many meetings and team-building exercises.
If your organization needs to schedule meetings and prepare PowerPoints to get things done you’re at a competitive disadvantage. Because of the Internet consumers are expecting brands to respond rapidly to questions or problems with products. You need to realign your organization around customers and stop with meetings and team-building exercises.
Meetings are. waste of time
Keep meetings short. Ideally, a meeting should be the length of a sitcom episode not a film by Martin Scorsese. Bartleby’s law is that 80% of the time of 80% of the people at meetings are wasted. If you doubt the numbers, have a think about the last big meeting you attended. Did everyone speak or was the discussion dominated by a small subset? How many people were gazing at their phones?
A lot of people attend meetings out of a sense of duty or fomo (fear of missing out). And what is the purpose of the meeting? If it is just to update people on progress, that can be done in an email or in a one-to-one conversation (which has the added benefit of allowing you to talk to your staff). Big meetings involving all the staff should be reserved for big news like acquisitions or lay-offs.
Team-Building Doesn’t Build Teams
Paintballing in the woods, tackling an army assault-course, constructing a model of the Empire State Building from matchsticks—no one wants to do this stuff. They don’t want to go to an awayday weekend, either; they would much rather be at home with their families. Why not build a team by introducing its members and explaining what you want each of them to do? It is a lot cheaper. It also wastes a lot less of everybody’s valuable time.
These changes might just make your firm a more efficient and pleasant place to work where you focus on the customer. That is a reasonable goal for 2020.
