by John J. Walters

I think it was Charles Dickens who observed that rich folks (back in “the day”) would pay good money to buy and maintain a horse and buggy to ride for pleasure, while they would turn up their noses at a delivery job that required them to drive one every day (and would pay them to do it).

In the same way, employees everywhere complain about meetings, and yet when we all go out to happy hour after work, what exactly is it that we all talk about?  You guessed it — work!  Sure, there might be a good amount of gossip in there too, but the fact is that it’s hard to escape talking about something that you spend so much time focused on.

The key difference here, besides the alcohol, is that there are no rules governing happy hour.  We’re all free to stay as long as we please, and most of us choose to stay longer than the average meeting.  The interesting thing to note is that we could all rush home to do whatever it is we were daydreaming about all day.  But we choose to stay, and (often) to talk about work.

Yes, there is a certain natural resistance to attending meetings, just as there is a certain natural draw to happy hour.  Most likely, this is because everyone has attended more than their fair share of ineffective and inefficient meetings, and so they assume that this will be the case with all meetings.  So, when you’re scheduling a meeting, always remember that people don’t want to be there.

Sue Pelletier of meetingsnet.com even went so far as to create a top-10 list of the best ways to drive her from a meeting, and I have to say that I agree with all of them (and could probably add a few to the list).  As a service to you, the reader who probably doesn’t click hyperlinks, I have condensed the list into a brief list that I call…

The Ten Commandments of Meetings

• Thou shalt not run a meeting entirely from PowerPoint.
• Thou shalt not keep attendees sitting in a dark, uncomfortable room for too long.
• Thou shalt not use too much jargon and too many clever acronyms.
• Thou shalt not impart useful information without leaving time for it to sink in.
• Thou shalt not be too serious all the time.
• Thou shalt not completely ignore the agenda once a meeting begins.
• Thou shalt not hold the meeting in a room nobody can find.
• Thou shalt not open with a completely unrelated keynote speaker.
• Thou shalt not be rude to others in attendance.
• Thou shalt not encourage cliques among your attendees.

I can’t guarantee that following these rules will get you into “meeting heaven” but they do provide a decent jumping off point.  If you can think back to some of the worst meetings you’ve ever attended — the ones you really wanted to leave early — I’ll bet they violated at least one of these commandments.