Did you know that the average executive spends 23 hours a week in meetings,  and 51% of professionals say spending too much time in meetings that’s 100 hours a month, and over a 1,000 hours a year. Do the math on this and a company of 100 spending 1,000 hours a year in meetings is 100,000 meeting hours a year. At an average hourly rate of $50 per hour that is $5m of meetings!

Performance management is the answer to average meetings

Performance management are the systems and processes by which a company, managers and employees align their goals in a mutually beneficial way. The pillars of Performance management to build upon are Strategy, Goal Setting and Dialogue.

A full-time employee working a typical 36 hours work week will have about 1,700 hours to contribute towards either goals that are strategically important, or business-as-usual activities that keep a company running. Business-as-usual (BAU) will include everything from payroll and contracts, to following established business operational processes. What is ‘strategically important’ is where strategy and goal setting comes into play.

When strategy and goal setting are done well employees have goal, role and plan clarity. They know what to work on when not working on the BAU. They will have committed to aligned goals with measurable outcomes using goal setting frameworks like Objectives and Key Results or OKR.

When you commit to using frameworks like OKR you’re committing to a more empowered and autonomous way of working where employees align their goals with company goals and set more ambitious targets. You’re also committing to talking about progress, plans, problems and wins regularly – usually weekly.

A typical performance management meeting schedule

At first glance this might look like a lot, but it’s not. It’s actually a lot less than goes on now, and it’s a lot better. Done well, a quarterly performance management meeting cadence looks like this:

• Independent Check-ins (5 minutes per week – 1 hours a quarter)
• Manager Weekly 1-on-1’s (30 minutes per week – 6 hours a quarter)
• Short Weekly Team Meetings (30 mins per week – 6 hours a quarter)
• Monthly Review Meetings (45 – 60 mins – 3 hours a quarter)
• Quarterly OKR Planning Meetings (2 hours a quarter)
• Quarterly Personal Development Planning (1 hour a quarter)

Over a 90 day quarter there is going to be about 19 hours of meetings. This equates to about 5% of available time. This 5% is time spent with colleagues on goal and execution centric agendas.

This of course leaves over 95% of an employee’s time for delivering what needs to be delivered. Which is the point of performance management and OKR. When you stop trying to control and micromanage and trust your employees to work towards agreed goals, you free up the need for lots of the meetings you have to try and stay in control. You meet less and the meetings you do have have more focus.

Fewer ‘command and control’ or ‘what should I do’ meetings result in more time is spent solving problems, having ideas, developing new knowledge and skills, and actually ‘getting shit done’.

Crop just 20% of your meetings out of the diary and do the math. You’ll typically save millions if you’ve over 100 employees that need to meet as part of delivering your products or services to market.

All of which of course is how employees want to be managed in 2021 and beyond. Which leads to increased retention, another hard cash saving with the average cost of losing an employee put at $30,000 to $45,000.