Meetings Under the Microscope: Cost vs. Benefit

How many meetings do you have each week? How easy is it for someone to call a meeting?

If your school is like many others, maybe the answers are"too many!" and "too easy".

Meetings often feel like the simplest way to keep everyone informed, but they rarely deliver. Conversations drift, attention slips, and interruptions derail progress. A cost-benefit lens can cut through the noise, helping you quantify decisions, allocate resources wisely, and hold the team accountable for how time is spent.

Meetings are costly, too. A meeting of six people doesn’t cost an hour, it costs six hours. Was the meeting REALLY worth 6x the hourly salary of everyone in the room? In the average international school, that would be $240 based on an average hourly rate of $40 for most senior leaders in international schools. Put in those terms, would an e-mail have been better ... and cheaper? 

Sure, meetings have a broader purpose than information transfer. They allow for clarification and collaboration and just as importantly, they help to build community and collegiality.

But that aside, how many meetings could be reframed as the last resort, not the first option? Could they be harder to set-up?

Amazon goes so far as requiring a 6-page memo prior to every meeting. The first portion of any meeting is dedicated to reading the memo.  Signals don't allow staff to access each other's calendars and to auto-add people to meetings, they have to e-mail and ask. The intentional friction makes people think twice before calling meetings.

Meetings are an inevitable part of school life. But they can be made better. At this point we are assuming your meetings have agendas and are minuted. Beyond that think about:

Timing

Is Friday morning at 7:30am really the best time?

Attendance

Does everyone need to attend and does everyone always need to attend? If 80% of the meeting content relates to, say, just one Key Stage, could it be optional for everyone else?

Friction

Any meeting with more than, say, three people should be hard to set up. There should be built in friction; stop-pause-reflect. Could this be an e-mail? Could you use a strict agenda with no AOB option. Could you require written summaries of agenda items prior to the meeting avoiding the use of cryptic one-liners or titles only?

Write Well

Cultivate a culture of good writing. How many announcements and meetings could be saved if people wrote well crafted e-mails? And, moreover, a well written, clear, and concise e-mail shouldn't need a meeting to explain it.

Hatches and Matches?

You'll want to celebrate marriages, births, and significant events in staff lives (the community building bit), but does everyone really need to hear a blow-by-blow account of the latest staff football match? As ever, balance (and brevity) is key.

Coffee and Cake

"We know this is an imposition on your time, so here's some coffee and cake in recognition..."

Meetings should be hard to set-up and (if not relevant to a participant) easy to get out of. They should be intentional not simply habitual - they should fix something.

PS: Don't conflate intentionality with formality. A meeting doesn't need to be formal, but it does need to have purpose. Routines and rituals risk being faux; you want personable, not procedural. 

Resources:

A guide to good meeting etiquette - this is short and sharp, not new, but useful!

The Google way of doing meetings. They are efficient after all.

Basecamp is a tech industry leader with a great employee handbook. Its a good guide to how good team communication can look.