“A meeting consists of a group of people who have little to say – until after the meeting.” ― P.K. Shaw
“Stretch Meetings” are extended term cloud based meetings that take the place of time-draining internal work meetings and conference calls.
• The typical American professional attends over 60 meetings per month (Source: Meetings in America: A study of trends, costs and attitudes toward business travel, teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity (Greenwich, CT: INFOCOMM, 1998)
• Approximately 50% of meeting time is wasted (Source: Meetings in America: A study of trends, costs and attitudes toward business travel, teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity (Greenwich, CT: INFOCOMM, 1998)
• 39% of people attending meetings doze off during the meeting (source: CBS News).
So how do Defer Stretch Meetings fix the above:
• Meeting time is scheduled for days, weeks or even months for open meeting.
o NOT scheduling days, weeks, or months OUT so all attendees can attend.
• Allows attendees to jump in and out of meetings as time allows
o NOT scheduling captives for 1 hour sessions
• Invest 5 minutes for your 5 minutes of input
o NOT Investing 1 hour for 5 minutes of input
• Allows more people to truly PARTICIPATE in meetings and add VALUE
o NOT have a single speaker for 59 minutes and talk over each other for the remaining minute.
• Allows language barriers to be broken down.
o NOT speaking too fast, or too slow for multi language calls.
• Allows meetings to easily cross time zones.
o NOT getting up at 4am, or working until 10pm for a meeting with Japan.
• Add value to 4 or 5 meetings in the first 20 minutes of each day with notices of new content.
o NOT navigate your way through each day trying to fit work in between each scheduled meeting you have.
• Have every question, answer, shared file and attendee list saved for future review long after meeting is complete.
o NOT assign someone to take minutes to the meeting and get only half of the points that were brought up.
• Everything for the meeting in one place.
o NOT scrounging through emails, online cloud folders, local drives, and hand written notes.
• Provide real time feedback through the meeting term to the host and other attendees.
o NOT sit silent during a meeting thinking “it will all be over soon.”