“Effective immediately, please limit meeting-planning meetings to 30 minutes,” reads the first line of a memo circulated Monday to the 640 employees of Fennimore Logistics Group, after an internal audit found that 38 percent of the time staff spend planning meetings is spent in meetings about planning them.
The audit, commissioned by the chief operating officer in the spring, tracked six weeks of calendars across four departments. It found that a typical one-hour meeting at the company was preceded by 51 minutes of planning, of which about 19 minutes took place in a separate meeting. The figure was highest in the operations group, where a weekly status meeting is planned at a weekly planning meeting.
The Audit
The audit was conducted by an outside consultant, who interviewed staff in 14 meetings. Four of those meetings were to schedule the interviews. Her report recommends that the company “consolidate planning activity into fewer, better-planned sessions,” and includes an appendix on how to plan them.
The memo asks managers to replace planning meetings with email “wherever possible” and to keep attendance at any remaining planning meeting to the people needed to plan the meeting. It was drafted, according to its footer, in a meeting.
A follow-up meeting to discuss the memo has been scheduled for Thursday at 10 a.m. A meeting to prepare for it is Wednesday at 3.
