Home > Blog > Buildings & Campus > When is a Meeting Necessary?

When is a Meeting Necessary?

Posted by Lenette Wells on Friday, April 10, 2015

Whether you are working through next year’s budget, looking at your list of deferred maintenance projects, or planning to implement a specific project, having conversations and gleaning input and direction from others is essential to making informed and confident decisions. So what do we [seemingly always] do? - We have meetings! And technology has made it ever-increasingly easy to plan and schedule meetings, further contributing to a meeting being a default response, packing your calendar full. But, all those meetings cost you and others a lot of time; time that you need to ensure is not being wasted, by you or by others.

So, which meetings do we need and which ones might be time better spent elsewhere? I thought this article “Do You really Need To hold That Meeting” from the Harvard Business Review gave a helpful process chart [below] and specific explanation on being strategic about when to call meetings. As the author, Elizabeth Grace Saunders, says, “With the right decision-making process, you can radically reduce the number of meetings you attend and increase the amount of work that gets done.”