The 76 hour long meeting

Last week I went to a routine university meeting. It took 72 hours.

It was only 2 hours long, but it took 72 hours because there were 38 people in the room. That meeting collectively took all those hours away from us. I'm just guesstimating there were 38 people in the room.

Let's invent a round number that the average annual salary+benefits of the attendees was $100,000. (We have great bennies, as we're unionized.) Working 2000 weeks per year (40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year). Then the average hour per person is $50 dollars. So that meeting cost $3,800, not counting the coffee and the cookies. Quibble with the math one way or the other (and there are so many quibbles to be had), but the truth is if you're getting several people on the payroll to sit in a room (even a zoom room) at the same time, that meeting is pushed along by a river of institutional cash flow.

As this meeting was going on, I was remembering how Steve Heard wrote (in 2018) about a 1-hour meeting that took 12 hours, because twelve people were in the meeting. That blog post really changed how I think about meetings. It lit a constant fire underneath me to run a tight meeting, for everyone's sake.

I've been running more and more meetings nowadays. (Not sure if I mentioned that I'm the chair of my university's academic senate? It feels like more than half of my job is meetings. The vast majority of them are actually worth my time, I'm pleasantly surprised to report.) I'm ever so conscious that the people I'm meeting with could be writing, mentoring, researching, teaching, outreaching, communicating, paperworking, or any of the everything else they expect us to do.

So if we have an occasion to bring people together, it damn well better be worth everybody's time. Now that I'm regularly running meetings, and a participant in even more of them, I'm feeling extraordinary pressure to make sure that these are efficient and on point. That the agenda doesn't have stuff on it that don't need to be there. That there is an agenda. When people choose to share, they stay focused. What's the source of this pressure to run a tight meeting? It's me. Just me. Only me.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has ever leaned on me or anybody else in this university to keep meetings on point. Somehow folks are resigned to some meetings being a waste of time. They might skip out or they might go. Other than groaning about such useless marathons, are we communicating with one another about fixing this? These situations are the bane of our academic work! The only way to control these things is to establish behavioral norms and to have the person running the meeting to keep things on point, but when those things don't happen, who is interceding?

It's really easy to keep your head down, focus on your stuff, and not make waves when people are wasting your time. And since many people at meetings are in some kind of vulnerable situation (as usually there is a disparity of power among folks), then interceding is hard. Which means it's on the people who have the privilege and position to fix things to actually fix things. As always. How about we start with efficient meetings?

Admittedly, It's really hard to tamp down verbosity when air is being sucked out of the room, along with our literal time being sucked away. Collegiality requires that we hear one out and respect one another. And I think we just need to extend that definition of collegiality to protecting one another's time with a gentle but firm approach.

Yet, if we bulldoze through meetings, then we don't leave space for creativity, free expression, inclusion, and support for minoritized perspectives. This is a careful dance to create an environment where people feel and know that they are being heard. If a meeting just goes on and on and on, then an emphasis on creativity and inclusion will be for naught because the signal will get lost in the noise. Active listening is critical for building community, and once folks get tuned out, does it matter what is being said anymore? Only in well-run meetings can the disenfranchised perspective have an opportunity to be genuinely heard.

I'm just saying. The formula for the time consumed in a meeting is:

Time spent in a meeting = (Duration of a meeting) (Number of attendees)

That's it. That's all I wanted to say. Catch you next time.