Learn Software Development

In the organization that I work in, there is a culture of having meetings on the drop of a hat for discussion of issues. This is normally justified for the following reasons:
- Meetings avoid long winded email discussions where the point made by a person could be misconstrued or not understood properly.
- Meetings bring together all the stakeholders for a particular discussion, which can be difficult in an email or 1;1 phone discussions.
- A meeting ensures that the discussion can be a focused discussion, focusing on the points in hand, and ensuring that an outcome is available at the end of the meeting.
- When a meeting is properly run, there is a high chance that a lot of the outstanding issues can be resolved and this helps in moving the project ahead.

However, meetings have a cost. Consider a manager who decides that he or she needs to discuss something with their staff. Such a meeting will typically have all the attending people reporting to the person, and when the calling manager is a senior manager, such meetings can be a costly affair. I have seen cases of such meetings lasting for 1-3 hours or more, and when you consider that some of the senior people attending are those who are paid the big bucks, and yet are not involved in the issues that are being discussed, it tends to get problematic. Consider the case of the Vice-President of a group who has people reporting to him from different functional areas, and yet they get together to discuss issues that would be more relevant to the Dev area (in which people from the QE group, Documentation group, Support group, etc) are there without any valid reason and are only wasting their time.

For a company that was infested with such time-wasting meetings, one of the new enterprising managers came up with a suggestion. This was recognized as a problem, but nothing much was being done to tackle this problem. So when the suggestion came up to calculate the cost of such meetings and let the senior management know of the cost of such meetings that happened within middle management, it was welcomed as a brand new initiative that could possibly work. So what happened next ?

Well, a HR person was deputed to spend 1 month, with a few hours every week, to be invited to all such meetings that were held for people at certain designations at middle management. The HR person had access to salary levels, and since they would be there at the start of the meeting, could calculate the amount of money involved in every meeting by viewing all the people attending, and would also know the duration of the meeting. This helped calculate the cost of the meeting, and this information was regularly circulated among senior management.

Over time, and when some ridiculous meetings were found, things started getting better. For example, there was a certain meeting of middle management that was called because a particular group head was upset that equipment supplies were getting finished at a rate faster than he expected (items such as pens, notepads, etc). When the cost of the meeting attendees was calculated, it was as much as the cost of the supplies for that group for a couple of months, and drew a lot of guffaws in senior management, followed by some soul-searching in management, and led to the circulation of some guidelines for deciding when to call meetings. This was met by relief by a lot of people in middle management, who would be called to meetings where it made no sense for them to go, but it was not worth it for them to ruffle egos by not attending.