The cost of unproductive meetings

In many respects I still haven't made the jump from the private sector to the public sector despite my twelve years of employment in the government. The culture is just so different because there is no culture to perform at a productive level.

I am now surrounded by a bunch of people, many who have never worked in private enterprise believing they are businessmen and businesswomen, but maintain a public sector mentality of poor productivity and a failure to take responsibility.

We have a whole contingent of professional meeting attendees who fail to achieve any measurable outcomes from these meetings whatsoever. I call these government meetings; these are meetings with no agenda, no minutes, no implementation plan and no outcomes. We don't even know who attended these meetings, what was discussed and most of the time they can't even recall the date.

We have had discussions where I have been told we agreed on this, my question usually is, "was I there?" Needless to say, the minutes of the meeting are never distributed to any team members because there isn't any.

Ironically, registered training organisations offer a unit of competency in BSBADM502B Manage Meetings, this is a unit in the business administration curriculum designed to equip graduates with the skills to effectively manage meetings.

It goes without saying if I have to call a meeting, an agenda is published and minutes recorded but I do this on a personal level as per my private sector training. The implementation plan is recorded and during subsequent follow-up meetings, the implementation plan is reviewed and updated as required.

As part of our professional development requirements, all team members should undertake this unit of competency, there should be no recognition of prior learning with all candidates required to undertake the full learning and assessment package. Then the cost of unproductive meetings and the cost to the organisation might eventually be negated.

You would actually think that with all these meetings attended that they would become pretty good at this; but unfortunately this is the government - think again. Across the organisation, I would hate to actually calculate the cost of these unproductive meetings, as I believe that more than 80% of meeting time is wasted based on my observations.