Published: April 26, 2025
FOMO - Fear of missing out
The goal of an exceptional meeting culture is to allow for people to constructively decline meetings by fully understanding the consequences of their action.
Let me explain!
It is common knowledge that office workers in general suffer from a situation of too many meetings. To be more precise; too many meetings where the value of their attendance is vague or unclear, either for input or output or both. Meetings tend to be slow, take forever, not accomplishing the thing that it was set out to do so a follow up meeting must be scheduled. They tend to drag out. This is (to no-ones surprise) quite expensive. Head-count multiplied by time will easily put a lot of meetings at a cost of thousands of euros. Is that kind of money used effectively during the meeting? Sometimes, sure, but usually no.
As the size of a meeting goes up, so does the vague invites. Invites where the person does not have a clear reason to go but will probably join anyway because of FOMO. Effectively potentially wasting valuable time and focus. Bigger meetings also tends to makes it harder for people to be active and join in on the discussion.
On top of all that, people are busy! They have things going on, more things on their plate than they can comfortably handle and a deadline coming around the corner. This is normal! Having to go to yet another meeting might be a make-or-break situation for someone.
Initiating a culture into an organisation is known to be a hard problem, I don’t intend to solve that. But, if you don’t know what type of meeting culture that you want, you also don’t know what you are aiming at.
The purpose of a meeting
So, what would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like? It all comes down to the things that takes place when it’s not a meeting. You’ll see! The challenge is that the in-between things relies on personal discipline, which is where the expectations from the culture comes in. If you are expected to do something it has a higher change of getting done.
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