Mark Murphy

Imagine that you have a meeting scheduled for 60 minutes, but you only have 45 minutes worth of content. How long does that meeting last? Of course, it lasts the full 60 minutes.

What if you only have 35 minutes worth of content? The meeting still lasts 60 minutes. 25 minutes of content? Don’t worry, you’ll still be there for 60 minutes.

(What if you actually had 60 minutes worth of content? In that case, your meeting would probably take 90 minutes!)

For you scientist types, you learned in physics class (thanks to Boyle and Bernoulli) that a gas will expand to fill the available space (for example, there’s not a little pocket of oxygen in the middle of your office right now; it’s expanded to fill your entire office). Well, in more ways than one, meetings are like gas; they will expand to fill whatever space you give them.

Why do most meetings last 60 minutes, regardless of how much content there is? It’s because we usually don’t have any other way of knowing when the meeting is over. Our schedule said we have a 1-hour meeting, so it’ll be done when that hour is expired.

We recently conducted a study, which we’ll be releasing to the media in a few weeks, that analyzed meetings. In one part, we asked people coming out of meetings whether the meeting they just attended had accomplished its original objective. Sadly, the most common response wasn’t “yes” – and it wasn’t “no,” either. The most common response was, “I have no idea.”

(Of course, uncertainty levels are usually higher after virtual meetings, as any number of technical hiccups can exacerbate the problem.)

The overwhelming majority of meeting attendees can’t tell you the real objective of a particular meeting. Sure, they sit through lots of meetings, some of which even have agendas, but they still can’t articulate the actual objective of the meeting.

Whether your meetings are face-to-face or remote, there's a simple tool to ensure that everyone in attendance achieves your objective (and that they do it without lots of off-topic chit-chat so everyone can get back to work). This simple yet powerful tool works in any meeting environment, but it's absolutely essential to leaders in the virtual workplace – people who manage remote employees. Learn more about this tool in our new live webinar, "The Science of Managing Remote Employees." The first 100 registrants get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.

This causes two big problems. First, if you don’t know the real objective of the meeting, it’s pretty hard to assess whether the meeting was a success or failure. Second, if you can’t describe the objective, you don’t know when you’ve achieved that objective. And that means that you don’t know when you can tell all the participants, “Hey gang, we just accomplished our objective, so let’s get the heck out of here.”

I’ve always been amazed that so many meetings take exactly 60 minutes. Regardless of the company, industry, size, geography, type of meeting, etc., they all seem to take 60 minutes. It turns out that every meeting takes 60 minutes because we don’t have a way of measuring when we’ve accomplished our objective. Instead of clear objectives, all we’ve got is a calendar entry that says this is a 60-minute meeting.

How do you fix this (and cut the wasted time out of your meetings)? Very simply, you write a Statement of Achievement for every single meeting (including conference calls, etc.). A Statement of Achievement is one sentence that says, “As a result of this meeting, we will have achieved [insert your objective here].”

It’s not complicated; it’s just a statement that tells you what this meeting needs to achieve before we can adjourn and go back to whatever we should be doing. And if you can’t identify a hyper-specific achievement that defines the meeting, you should cancel that meeting.

It doesn’t matter what your Statement of Achievement says, as long as everyone in the meeting will know exactly when you’ve achieved it. Time is not a good metric for assessing the success of a meeting. But agreeing on a price for the proposal, picking a color for the new product, settling on a new location, or completing 10 employee reviews, are all viable Statements of Achievement. And they’ll tell you exactly when you’ve achieved success (so you can leave the meeting and go accomplish some other work).

Here’s a startling revelation: Every one of our clients that implements this simple technique saves – on average – 15 minutes from every meeting. (How much time could YOU save every single day if you could shorten every 1-hour meeting by 15 minutes?) It turns out that most 60-minute meetings do NOT have 60 minutes worth of content. And even when they do, if you tell people that the meeting ends as soon as they achieve their objective, they cut out all the nonsense and chit-chat and focus like a laser beam on achieving that objective.

Too many meetings are seen as a waste of time. But if you can eliminate the wasted time from your meetings, using the Statement of Achievement, everyone will be more productive and much happier.

Whether your meetings are face-to-face or remote, there's a simple tool to ensure that everyone in attendance achieves your objective (and that they do it without lots of off-topic chit-chat so everyone can get back to work). This simple yet powerful tool works in any meeting environment, but it's absolutely essential to leaders in the virtual workplace – people who manage remote employees. Learn more about this tool in our new live webinar, "The Science of Managing Remote Employees." The first 100 registrants get $50, so hurry to reserve your seat now.