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Why Your 60-Minute Meeting Is 30 Minutes Too Long

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We’ve all been there – sitting in a meeting that could have easily ended a half-hour ago – but for some reason, the meeting just crawls on and on.

One person may go off on a tangent that may be mildly interesting but has no relevance to the meeting’s objectives. Another person may ask a question that they would have already known the answer to if they were paying attention five minutes earlier. Yet another may deliver a 5- or 10-minute monologue that only has relevance to one other team member at the meeting and could have more easily and efficiently been handled via one well-written email.

Regardless of the reason, business meetings too often turn out to be a waste of time and resources. That was a major conclusion of the book “The Surprising Science of Meetings,” written by Steven G. Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte and perhaps the world’s “leading expert” on business meetings.

“Poorly conducted meetings clearly hurt leaders, teams, departments, and organizations,” Rogelberg writes. However, that is not to say that meetings should be eliminated. In some cases (when performed properly), meetings are a necessary means of exchanging ideas, arriving at decisions, and keeping team members informed.

Most companies view bad and unnecessary meetings as an inevitable cost of doing business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s simply a question of making meetings more productive and valuable to all participants – and a big part of that is choosing the right length of time.

Meetings in Corporate America: Too many and too long
On an average day in the U.S., 55 million meetings occur, according to Rogelberg’s research. That represents five-fold growth over the 11 million daily meetings that happened in 1976, according to a Harvard Business Review estimate.

Today, on average, non-managers attend eight meetings per week, while the number for managers climbs to 12. Chief executives may spend a whopping 60% of their time in meetings, according to Rogelberg.

Though most of us may prefer not to think about it, there is a time and cost associated with every meeting. An estimate by Xerox once found that meetings among its 24,000-employee development team cost the company over $100 million a year. Separately, an estimate from Lucid Meetings found that the U.S. spends $1.4 trillion per year on meetings, or roughly 8% of the nation’s annual gross domestic product.

Despite all this expense and investment, meetings often fail to accomplish much of anything productive – just ask the attendees. A 2014 survey of nearly 2,100 U.S. adults found that nearly half of respondents would rather do anything unpleasant, such as standing in line at the DMV or watching paint dry, than attend a status meeting. Further, more than one-third of respondents said status meetings are “a waste of time.”

Separately, a 2005 Microsoft survey of 40,000 global workers found that 69% said their meetings were unproductive.

30 minutes is the magic number
It’s all enough to make one ponder: If so many of us seem to agree that corporate America spends too much time in meetings that often fail to accomplish their objectives, then why don’t we cut down on the amount of time we spend in meetings? Judging from a couple of Google searches, I’m not the only one.

Luckily, there’s a simple way to reduce the amount of time we all spend in meetings: Never allow them to exceed 30 minutes.

Plenty of other meeting-weary attendees have come to the same conclusion:

  • “Scheduling meetings for more than an hour is non-productive,” writes Time Management Ninja. “You lose people’s interest, energy, and attention. Even worse, meetings will always expand to fill the allowed time.”
  • “I maintain if individual prep work is done beforehand by each participant and the meeting starts on time and stays on focus, everything included in a reasonable hour-long agenda could well be covered in 30 minutes with plenty of time for meaningful, yet not excessive banter,” says Nate Towne on LinkedIn.
  • “I believe that all meetings should be 30 minutes or less,” writes Tessa Palmer on Medium. “And not a second longer. If you can’t say what you’re going to say in half-an-hour, then you’re doing it all wrong.”

While doing away with hour-long meetings might seem like a dramatic shift to some, I believe it is more doable than many of us assume. Instead of hour-long meetings, try 15 – 20 minute huddles, SparkHire suggests. Come prepared with an agenda, ask attendees to brainstorm ideas by themselves ahead of time (a technique known as “brainwriting” that I’ve previously advocated), limit the number of participants to only those absolutely necessary, and start with what’s important.

So next time you’re tempted to send out a notice for a 60-minute meeting, pause, take a deep breath, and think about what you could do beforehand to cut that time in half. Your teammates will undoubtedly appreciate it.

Why Sales Is Content Marketing’s Best Friend (and the Importance of Being a Good Buddy)

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If you’re a content marketing professional who is anything like me, I feel for you. But let’s set that aside for the moment.

If you’re a content marketer, you might be overlooking one of the best sources of intel regarding how your target audience talks and just as important how they don’t talk.

Here’s the thing, good people: Search data can be instructive. It can also be misleading. At the very least, it needs to be gut-checked against the experience of the experts who continuously interact with, and listen closely to, the decision makers and influencers your company needs to reach. Who are these mysterious experts?

Your company’s sales force.

Look to your left. Look to your right. One of those people might be a salesperson.

To forge a good working relationship with salespeople around content marketing, you have to remember that the demands on their time are already quite high, their leadership is understandably protective of their attention, and in some cases their insights and best ideas were previously hoovered up to create resources or wins for which they didn’t receive any real credit.

So it’s critical to be a conscientious colleague. Put yourself in their shoes and approach working with them as a two-way street, rather than a one-way value-extraction operation.

The glorious benefits of working with salespeople

Let’s look at a simple example from the world of revenue cycle management (RCM).

Imagine you work for a company that sells software and hardware solutions designed to help providers accept and process patient payments, verify patient insurance and coverage details, and estimate patients’ financial obligation before they receive care.

Further imagine that your company has two sales teams one focused on small and medium-sized outpatient facilities, and one focused on large hospitals and health systems. Finally, imagine that you, the snazzily dressed content marketer, need to develop content that helps generate quality leads for both teams.

Step one is understanding the same messaging won’t necessarily work for all audiences. Step two is making sure you gut-check the messaging and language you do use with the salespeople who talk to those audiences every day, and pick their brain for what makes the relevant decision makers perk up their ears. Doing so will ensure you don’t mix messaging when it needs to be segmented, and that you don’t waste time segmenting your messaging where it doesn’t need to occur.

For small and medium-sized providers, topics and terms related to the above example might include “front office,” “patient payments,” or “patient collections.”

But an executive at a health system might see those same terms and think, “this content isn’t really intended for me.” Why? Because their ears and eyes are more attuned to terms such as “patient financial services” (PFS), “patient access,” and “patient financial responsibility.” In addition, they might hear/read “patient collections” as an outsourcing service, rather than a function conducted in-house as part of PFS.

That’s the kind of real-world insight you gain from working with your salespeople. And when you have it, you not only have the ammo needed to self-optimize your content marketing work product you also have grounded insight that can inform your paid search and advertising, your booth materials, keyword research, direct mail campaigns, and all other marketing activities that involve copy in one capacity or another.

Pull up a chair and stay awhile

As I mentioned above, to truly harness the power of your sales team’s insight, you have to step up with respect. Here are a few suggested best practices based on my experience of getting it wrong and getting it less wrong:

Don’t schedule a stupid meeting. Examples of stupid meetings include:

Any meeting that takes place during that salesperson’s most critical or productive selling hours. (Ask them what day/time is best.)
Any meeting that cuts into their time at the end of the month or end of the quarter.
A meeting in which you give a lengthy presentation or introduce yet another spreadsheet where they’re supposed to do or track something.
A meeting scheduled based on assumed interest or assumed uniform interest. Talk to the sales managers a little first; they’ll know who to connect you to.

Ask if it’s OK to just kind of hang out and work on your own stuff while you absorb what they’re saying to prospects, upsell clients, and each other. Not everyone is comfortable with this approach, and not every office setup is conducive to it, but pulling up a chair and being a fly on the wall (or wherever the chair is) is a great way to gain insight and generate new content ideas. Even better, it cuts down on the additional demands you’re placing on sales folks’ time and attention.

Snacks never hurt nobody. You’re a guest in their world. Bring some good coffee, some quality cookies, a bag of dang fine tangelos whatever floats your bobber. If you really, really have to schedule a stupid meeting, spring for lunch. These are gestures of respect, but they’re also a helpful way to get and keep the conversation going. Based on careful research, I can tell you it’s called breaking bread for a reason.

Look for ways to help them. Whether it’s copy-editing a high-profile email, showing them a Microsoft Word or Google Docs trick, or helping them navigate a byzantine content management system, there are countless ways your skills can turn the hangout into a more equitable exchange.

Celebrate and reward. Make sure their bosses (and, as appropriate, their bosses’ bosses) are aware of the their extra effort and contributions after you demonstrate qualitative and/or quantitative improvement.

Summing up: Snacks are key, content is king

Pair this approach with an overall sound marketing and PR strategy, and your prospect audience(s) will experience a seamless content funnel that feels almost perfectly tailored to their interests one that makes them want to learn more.