Substack

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Nudging to keep meetings short

An old wag has it that meetings are where minutes are recorded and hours wasted. The effectiveness of administration (and management) in both public and private sectors is to a large extent dependent on the clarity and focus of the frequent meetings at different levels. Most often, meetings meander along for a long time, and ends with considerable opportunity cost bill.

In this context, the Nudges blog points to a clock that tells you how much your office meeting is costing (number of people in the meeting x average hourly wage). All you need is to simply enter the number of people in the room, ballpark an average hourly wage, and press the start button for the clock to start ticking on the cost of the meeting.



Wonder whether there is a clock which can measure the level of restlessness (or declining attention spans) among participants (using camera-based sensors) and trigger the closure of meetings when it crosses a threshold?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good idea to implement. I wish every one (or atleast people who can influence their subordinates) in our country work like you Mr.Gulzar. I am really impressed the way you are working. I can see that in results or people are leaving on Personal leave :). Good Job sir...

మాగంటి వంశీ మోహన్ said...

Very good question ending the blog post. :) Wish there was one such clock! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Leaving the pure essence of time - Here’s my theory about meetings: the two things you cannot fake in a meeting are creativity and competence. And the trouble brews - when uncreative people attend / join the meeting and becomes toxic while they (incompetent people) try to be something they can never be. Question is that the effort they put into concealing their inabilities, could it be used for something else instead? Or let the clock tick in wasting the meeting time and making it more toxic.

From my observation - They - the incompetent people - when asked for a input on a given idea, all they can come up with is - you know!! :)

Anyways - very glad to see you in the blog world sire!

Vamsi M Maganti
http://www.maganti.org/

డింగరి (Dingari) said...

Excellent idea to implement.

First thing, I would suggest, is if there is a gadget to find out that a person is really qualified to attend the meeting and get rid of those uncompetitive people even before the meeting would save lot of money and time .

Second thing is productivity out of the meeting, means, when you ask people to talk about some thing, then can talk anything (....) but when you ask them to implement it then the actual productivity comes out of meeting, which will, infact, never happen.

If a person is intelligent, creative, competitive and sincere about work (like you) then they have to fight a battle to work to be done in this "..." world. And result of that you will get a "Transfer Order". Nice :)

Anyways - inspite of your busy, Thank you for taking time to share your thoughts on the blog.


Dingari