Back-Office Breakthroughs is a newsletter for sharing ideas and tactics that back-office teams can use to thrive in today’s dynamic economy.
One quote:
"If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings." – Dave Barry
One problem:
Most meetings are a waste of time.
One idea:
Eliminate meetings with low task completion rates.
Our thoughts in 500 words or less:
We’ve all been there: attending a meeting even though we know the impact on our key business priorities is quite low. Sometimes we might be encouraged to attend by our bosses, or we may be doing it to support a colleague or, worse still, we may be attending simply because we struggle to say no to invitations. Since back-office teams in finance, IT, or human resources are often supporting so many other departments, we get a lot of meeting invites which, in aggregate, can negatively impact our ability to complete higher priority tasks. At a prior job, I performed a meeting audit of my team to see if I could free up more time for higher priority growth projects and I was shocked by what I discovered. Almost 50% of the meetings my team and I were attending had either no clearly defined tasks associated with them or, worse still, resulted in a variety of tasks with low completion rates. Highlighting a need to focus on higher priority growth projects, my team and I began to quietly decline the vast majority of these meetings and were surprised to discover that no one really pushed back. Now, don’t get me wrong, there are definitely some meetings which are important to attend for relationship building or information sharing but these sorts of meetings should be clearly defined as such and usually don’t need to take more than an hour per week. For all the other meetings that are presented as having clear objectives and action items, we discovered that 8-12 hours per month could be freed up by simply avoiding those meetings where: (1) few if any tasks were actually being assigned; and/or (2) assigned tasks were often never completed.
If you and your back-office team are struggling to complete key growth projects and suspect that you are wasting time with too many meetings, we would highly recommend a meeting audit that ranks your team’s meetings relative to assigned tasks and task completion rates. To paraphrase a 2021 tweet from Clario’s Jay Ferro, the three stages of career development are: “1. I want to be in the meeting; 2. I want to run the meeting; and, 3. I want to avoid meetings."
If you are interested in figuring out which meeting you and your team can avoid in order to free up time for higher priority growth projects, please contact me to schedule a demo of the CuroWork back-office software suite which now includes a meeting audit tool.
We’re here to help and have spent nearly two decades solving back office problems. Our unique software tools will allow you to overcome the challenges of hybrid work and enable your back office teams to thrive in today’s dynamic economy. If you are interested in discussing how to get your back office teams to stop missing their performance goals and start exceeding them, please reach out to our founder, Daniel Paik, to learn more.
About CuroWork:
CuroWork was founded to build trusting teams by clearly aligning all work around the right things at the right time.
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