Checking your phone? Meetings often waste your time. 3 things make them successful

During the pandemic, I’ve come to love meetings, especially Zoom get-togethers. The chance to sit at my desk for hours, try to figure out who is talking if there are more than eight people on the screen, and guess who’s multitasking while trying to appear engaged, has been a thrill.

You know I’m joking, right?

I’m the opposite of a meeting lover. Meetings drive me nuts, especially the ways they can be disrespectful of our time.

I learned the value of effective meetings early in my career, when I worked for a contract research firm in my first real job — at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio. If we called meetings, our projects paid for any person’s time, based on his or her charge-out rate. Because many people were experienced and thus expensive, we were mindful about who we asked to meetings. We held only necessary meetings, with people who were needed, and made those gatherings quick and efficient.

Then I joined the university world, where people think differently about meetings. We don’t think about the real cost of having 10 or 15 people in a room for two hours. For too many years, I chafed in meetings because I sat there, estimating the charge-out rates of participants, and then calculated the many hundreds of dollars (or more) sitting around the table. I finally gave up that pastime to save my sanity.

The other day, though, I was in a three-hour meeting with nine people and just a five-minute break, and I came away utterly delighted. I congratulated the facilitator and said that the meeting had met the 3-E benchmark.

“3-E benchmark?” he asked. “I just thought we generated great ideas and solved some problems.”

“Ah, yes. One of my favorite CEOs in town says you have to go further – to the 3E level. Any meeting should have three goals — to be energetic, engaging and enlightening.”

When I finished those three hours the other day, I came away with more enthusiasm than I’d started. The nine of us had shown energy and passion about the topic, and perhaps because of that, we’d stayed engaged for the entire time. No checking phones, no side conversations, no daydreaming.

Because much of the time was spent generating ideas and solving problems, I learned something and felt enlightened.

Now that he knows about 3E meetings, I look forward to attending his anytime.

Nancy Napier is a distinguished professor at Boise State University in Idaho. nnapier@boisestate.edu. She is co-author of “The Bridge Generation of Vietnam: Spanning Wartime to Boomtime.”

This story was originally published May 26, 2022 at 4:00 AM.