A regional office announced Monday that it would address its excessive meeting culture by appointing a nine-person Meeting Reduction Committee, whose first responsibility is to establish a recurring meeting.
The group will investigate why employees cannot complete their work during business hours, a problem leadership first noticed after several employees declined a meeting because they were trying to complete their work during business hours.
"We need to hear from the people closest to the problem," said project sponsor Lena Voss, inviting those people to spend Thursday afternoon describing it in a conference room. "Ideally, we can get everyone in one place."
The opening session has a two-hour agenda. Fifteen minutes are reserved for introductions, twenty for agreeing on the purpose of the committee, and thirty for discussing whether future sessions should last ninety minutes. The remaining time is labeled open discussion to protect flexibility.
Employees were asked to prepare a short presentation on the meetings they attend. Those presentations will be reviewed in smaller meetings before being consolidated into a presentation about the presentations. The committee expects this will prevent people from repeating information.
An early recommendation to cancel meetings without decisions was referred to a working group because the committee could not agree on the definition of a decision. Another recommendation, to send updates by email, generated concern that people might not read them. The committee proposed a weekly meeting to confirm that the updates had been read.
Operations analyst Dev Malik suggested measuring uninterrupted working time. His proposal was well received, and he has been invited to demonstrate the measurement in three stakeholder sessions next week. His normal analysis work will be reassigned once someone determines who has capacity.
Leadership described the response as encouraging. Attendance at the first committee meeting was nearly complete, with only one absence: an employee who had declined because she was finishing a customer report. Her manager said the committee would explore that behavior separately.
The investigation is expected to produce a practical action plan within six weeks, followed by a launch workshop, departmental briefings and a recurring review of the action plan. No meetings will be removed during the investigation because doing so could alter the evidence.
At publication time, the committee had postponed its first session after discovering that all nine members were attending the meeting scheduled to explain the committee.