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Brought to you by Liz Hilton Segel, chief client officer and managing partner, global industry practices, & Homayoun Hatami, managing partner, global client capabilities
Online overload. It can feel challenging for employees to find the time to get work done. Each week, many staffers spend two full workdays sitting in meetings and responding to emails, according to a Microsoft study of millions of workers. To help streamline communication, some companies are making meetings shorter, cutting down on the number of meetings scheduled, and setting aside certain hours to be devoted to meetings, with the rest reserved for focused work. [WSJ]
Coordinate with care. After many years of accepting bad meetings as a necessary part of running a business, executives are now trying to find better ways to coordinate, says a professor and author. One idea is to scrap the meeting agenda. Instead, focus on a question that must be answered. This ensures that the leader thinks through the purpose of the gathering. Managers can also try to encourage input from others, facilitating the conversation rather than monopolizing it. [NYT]
Aim to collaborate. While interacting might be easier than ever, value-creating collaboration isn’t, McKinsey senior partner Aaron De Smet and coauthors share. When meetings aren’t run well, decision making becomes slower and the quality of decisions suffers. Roughly six out of ten executives say that at least half the time they spend making decisions is ineffective, one McKinsey survey found. What’s more, when leaders try to resolve inefficient decision making, they rarely see the real issue: poor design and execution of collaborative interactions.
Time is money. McKinsey’s experience shows that leaders may want to start addressing time management institutionally. Increasingly, time management is an organizational issue with roots deeply embedded in corporate cultures. When adding a project or initiative, companies should analyze how much leadership attention, guidance, and intervention it will need. In our experience, this is the best way to start treating leaders’ time as a finite resource, just like your company’s financial capital. See three questions to ask before scheduling a meeting.
— Edited by Belinda Yu, editor, Atlanta
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