On the heels of last week’s post about how to run a startup board meeting, I attended a speaker event last week at the West Side YMCA in New York and the guest speaker was Jason Fried, author of REWORK and founder of 37Signals. One of the chapters in his book and topics that night was about how “meetings are toxic” and can be totally eliminated from a company.  I couldn’t agree more with the former, but have been thinking about the plausibility of the later ever since.

Unfortunately, “meeting-creep” is all too common as a company grows in size. At first, you have weekly meetings, then daily meetings, then quarterly meetings and finally, the semi-annual and/or annual meetings.  You have meetings of all varieties: one-on-one meetings, product meetings, strategy meetings, team meetings, meetings to coordinate all the meetings, etc and so forth. Before you know it half of your company is in meetings at any given time, which inevitable requires lots of senior management’s time to manage the meetings, or just attend the meetings “out of respect” for the employee hosting the meeting, which only makes the meeting seem that much more important or necessary to attend. It’s a vicious cycle my friends!

Here are the top two reasons I think meetings are toxic:

1. Productivity & Opportunity Cost – What could have those people been doing instead if they had been left to focus for that hour on big projects? Most topics discussed in meetings either could have been done via email or some other form of communication and/or didn’t need that many people even if an in-person pow-wow was necessary.
2. Expense – If there are 10 people in a meeting for an hour and the average salary of each person is $150,000 that meeting is costing over $720 per hour, not including benefits, which would tac on another 20% for a whopping $865 per hour.

So here are the top 5 ways I plan to reduce or eliminate meetings at my new company:

1. Standing Room Only – When New York’s own Mayor Michael Bloomberg was building Bloomberg, what is easily one of the largest, most successful technology company started in New York, he had a policy of taking all chairs out of the conference rooms. He found that when everyone is forced to stand up at every meeting the average meeting time went from one hour to 15 minutes or less.  When I build my first conference room it will have a table that is just high enough to take notes and zero chairs.
2. Optional Attendance – Jason mentioned a 5000+ person company (size doesn’t matter) who’s CEO has made all company meetings optional, including his own. He leaves it up to his trusted employees to decide for themselves is there is something more valuable they could be doing. I personally love this idea!  This forces meeting organizers to have to sell others on attending their meeting, which in turn forces them to really think hard if the meeting is valuable enough to spend the time convincing others to come or if it could be done another way or just not done at all.
3. Strict Start & Stop Times - The only thing worse than the people who schedule lots of meeting is the people who come late and make everyone else wait for them. These people are making the statement that whatever they were doing was more important than the pressing things the collective group has to do.   I am a big fan of starting exactly on time and locking the door on everyone, including the CEO, who is late. It is also crucial that you stop strictly on time, as then others will learn there is absolutely no spare time at the end so if they want to get their point across they better do it in the time allotted. Frankly, the people that are late probably don’t think the meeting is worth their time anyway and you will be doing them a favor by locking them out. Your new motto should be “lock’em out and throw’em out!”
4. Alternative Collaboration Tools – If meetings are all about communications and collaboration then use one of the many collaborate tools available that enable people to work on projects together real time, including Campfire,  Google Docs, the newly minted Chatter by Salesforce.com and the list goes on and on.
5. Just Say No! - Eliminate Meetings altogether as a rule. Do you have the guts to do it? 37Signals did and they are doing just find without them.

If you are at a startup, or any company for that matter, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that more and more meetings are “normal” as  you grow.  Normal is what YOU make it! If you decide that no meetings is normal than, voila!, it’s normal!  Don’t be a sheep, and for God’s sake don’t follow the sheep to slaughter.

Companies are filled with people that have nothing to do but fill their day with meaningless meetings.  It makes them feel as though they are accomplishing something.  The problem is that there are other employees that need to actually get work done.  If you are amongst the later don’t let the former drag you down or make you go home or work nights and weekends to “get real work done.”  You have a choice, even if that choice is to quit the company your working for to join one where you can be more productive, like mine:-)!