“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be ‘meetings.” – Dave Barry

No one likes sitting through a pointless office meeting.

Poorly run meetings can be a ball and chain to many organizations. They take up time when there’s work to be done, they’re often unproductive, and in many cases, altogether pointless. In fact, Mattel’s former CEO recently blamed meetings as the major factor behind their lack of an innovative culture.

So, the question is: Why do organizations spend so much time in formal meetings? How do they affect the engagement levels of the team? And is there a better way?

We asked our team to share their ideas and experiences around corporate meetings, and whether they can really have such a negative effect on organizational culture and employee engagement.

Anton Rius, Digital Marketing Manager

I’ve been a part of some pretty terrible meetings. They would last for 2 or more hours, dragging on and on without ever coming to an actionable conclusion. Everyone shared ideas and participated, but no decisions were made and no tasks were assigned. I think being in a good meeting room such as conference rooms in new york, makes the ideas flow better, rather than being in a dingy old office!

That’s the big problem with meetings, in my opinion. They are often used as a way for people to discuss their goals while diffusing the ownership of the decision. Rather than empowering employees to make executive decisions about their work, meetings are used to gain collective approval from people who may not have a full understanding of the problem, or the expertise to make a good decision.

And if meetings are meant to bring people together to tackle problems quickly and collectively, then this behavior does the opposite: It slows business down to a snail’s pace.

The fact is; the average American office worker wastes a lot of time on everything other than work. Between shovels full of pointless email, office banter, the phone ringing, and all of the other distractions that happen at the office, it’s a wonder how any work actually gets done!

Adding additional, pointless meetings on top of that takes even more time away from your team members when they could be spending that time on more important tasks.

Samantha Goldman, Associate

Oftentimes in organizations, meetings happen because of inertia; it’s the way it’s always been, and the people who realize they’re not productive don’t necessarily have the power to stop the meeting from happening.

In some organizations, the meetings are a remnant of the days when communication and decision-making only happened face-to-face. Today, due to technology and the faster pace of work and email/chat communication, most meetings are pointless.

But, before you decide to cancel all of your company’s meetings, take an inventory of what is actually happening in each meeting and whether some of that communication is repetitive. Maybe the communication would be better served through another channel, such as email.

Then, it’s critical to think about what actually could be happening in that face-to-face meeting instead, such as: group decision making, developing strategy, best practice sharing, highlighting work well done, gathering feedback, team trust building and/or professional development.

The key is to align the medium to the message: What do we absolutely need a meeting for, and then go from there. Make small experiments and gather feedback and see how these changes are affecting engagement levels. It’s more an art than a science, and should reflect the values of the organization and the team, the type of work you need to get done and your timeline for getting it done.

What works in one organization and department may not work in another, so be sure to constantly check in and see how it’s going.

Mark Emerson, General Manager

I was a consultant for a major telecom that will remain nameless, but in my opinion, the endless meetings were a complete waste of time and contributed to a total lack of execution on multiple fronts.

And the politics! Everyone and their mother had to be invited to these meetings, which meant that introductions alone took 10-15 minutes. The executives did almost all of the talking and the minions either took notes or pretended to listen while playing on their phones/laptops.

In almost all cases, these meetings involve far too many people, devolve into power plays and give a veneer to the idea that the organization is solving issues and moving forward, rather than just kaffeeklatsches.

Having said that, there have been well-organized meetings where there was a meeting coordinator. These meetings were on-topic, focused, short, and everyone walked away with actionable items with deadlines. This meant that no one was at the meeting just taking up space. In one case, the meeting organizer even dis-invited three people after the first organizational meeting because they were not given any actionable items. The following meetings were then just as productive as team members delivered and course corrections were made.

Even if these meetings were not in person, they were just as productive. In most cases there was a one-page agenda sent out beforehand, all electronics were banned, and PowerPoint presentations were limited to five slides. The coordinator captured everything and distributed the materials, making it a more free-flowing discussion that brought out great insights and ideas.

Cary Paul, Senior Associate

Often, organizations spend so much time in formal meetings because it is comfortable. People love structure and meetings are one of the last bastions of structure in American business.

Think about children. We are always hearing that children crave discipline and structure. We never grow out of that, and meetings give us that structure.

The intent of meetings is spot-on.  Really.  While the meeting may be unnecessary, too long, structured poorly, boring, or include the wrong people – the BASIC idea behind the meeting—every meeting—is sound and justifiable:  Sharing information. Making decisions. Keeping on track. Getting new ideas. All critical functions of a company, right there in a comfortable package that everyone knows how to behave in.

And because of our hardwired need for structure, everyone knows how to behave. Meetings are muscle memory for people; they play their roles and all is well.

A lot of criticism has circulated around the engagement levels of team members due to bad meetings. While they can turn people off, meetings can have a positive effect on engagement, if done correctly.

Engagement equals action, and meetings are held when we are getting ready to act.

Is there a better way to run meetings? Absolutely. Here are a few ideas for making your meetings more productive:

• Have everyone read their notes ahead of time, and the meeting becomes just a 20-minute decision making process. There’s less time sitting through presentations, and more time spent on productive, action-oriented activity.
• Find new and creative ways to engage people in your meetings. Involving all the members of your team amps up the participation level and gets ideas flowing.
• Remember: meeting planning comes from the outset. Two clear components must be determined. WHY are we having this meeting, and WHO should be there?  Every person should have a clear and distinctive role they play and a good reason to be involved, or not be there at all.

Your Turn

So, what do you think? Are meetings getting a bad rap based on a few peoples’ bad experiences? What advice can you share about creating a more engaging, actionable meeting? Remember that first impressions are a big thing, some companies may even go to the extreme and look into the Best limo service in Alexandria VA to impress potential clients! We’d love to hear your thoughts!

The world is a fascinating place.

Ever wonder how we are able to accomplish so much without one person directing all the moving pieces? iPhones, Wikipedia, cars, the shoes you wear, last night’s dinner; all these things were made possible through the efforts of thousands of people each pursuing their own ends, and in doing so they cooperated to make our lives better.

Economists call this emergent order, more commonly known as self-organization.

Although difficult to wrap our heads around, emergent orders are actually very common. Markets, law, and language are all examples of unplanned systems that evolve naturally through our interactions. The beauty of emergent orders is that they are able to thrive because they constantly change and adapt to new circumstances.

Organizations, on the other hand, are commonly thought of as “islands of planning in a sea of emergence.”  That thought is more or less correct; organizations involve layers of managers directing employees to address different challenges. But underlying that structure are rich environments of employees and teams connecting and cooperating to achieve great feats.

Self-organization is the life force that enables “work” to happen.

Because it’s difficult to pinpoint, it often goes unrecognized. Therein lies a significant organizational culture opportunity.

Below are several examples to help illustrate the relevance of and importance self-organization:

Organizational Culture and Values

Why do different departments use drastically different terminologies for the same thing? Why are some organizations more cohesive than others?

The answer is simple, although the mechanics behind it are pretty complex: Coworkers have a lot more influence on each other than we give them credit. Our attitudes and actions are as much a product of ourselves as they are the people around us. As we intermingle, our values cross-pollinate and shape the organization’s overall culture. And in doing so, the culture can take on a life of its own.

When one person has difficulty shaking habits that have emerged over the years, changing the culture becomes challenging. But within this challenge lies a hidden blessing: with enough positive enforcement, new habits can form and shape the culture over time.

Social Networks

Here’s a bold claim: the majority of work gets done outside the traditional chain of command.

In other words, people, driven by their desire to do their jobs successfully, self-organize to achieve their mutual goals. If you look at social networks within organizations, you’ll find that it may look very different from the org chart. The hubs are not necessarily managers, but rather employees with the broadest social connections who are able to bridge the gap between departments.

Given the ability and motivation, employees will diligently seek out solutions to their problems by building partnerships and sharing ideas. This is really a textbook case for emergence.

Rules, Policies, and Regulations

Sure, a lot of rules and regulations are cumbersome. Most people grudgingly accept them, and in a lot of cases they can be somewhat arbitrary.  But, behind each rule there’s a history, an event, or chain of events that brought it into being.

For example, recently gothamCulture has engaged in a long-term effort to create a culture of safety for one of our clients. Most organizations have safety policies, resulting from years of trial and error, and a process of learning from their successes and failures.

This particular organization simply didn’t sit down and lay out an ideal set of safety policies. In many cases they had had to figure things out the hard way; piece by piece.  In all cases, accidents, as unfortunate as they are, force organizations to reevaluate the way they protect employees from harm.  Rules are constantly evolving, and policies change, bit by bit, to ensure certain standards are maintained.

Sometimes policies are well-intentioned missteps, but the process behind it involves the nuanced interplay among people’s values, attitudes, and actions over time.

Why It Matters

So why does self-organization matter? How is emergence relevant to you or your organization?

Work is inherently social. It is a rich ecosystem that is constantly moving toward some end.  We cannot effectively understand organizations, let alone start to change them, without appreciating the role emergence and self-organization played in how getting the organization to its present state. By doing so, we reveal the many different avenues to implement change effectively.

Below are some great resources on emergent orders:

I, Pencil – Leonard Read

Emergence – Jane Adams

The Use of Knowledge in Society – Friedrich Hayek

Where Good Ideas Come From – Steven Johnson

Leadership and the New Science – Margaret Wheatley

Think back to the last company change initiative you spearheaded. If your company is like most, you sent a survey to employees via email. Some employees might have grumbled about it and eventually filled it out; the senior leadership team then sat down and attempted to make sense of the feedback.

Unfortunately, this approach can only take leaders so far. Organizational surveys aren’t always effective because they’re limited to what leaders think is important to ask. They fail to engage the organization’s stakeholders in an active dialogue, and they only address culture at one point in the process, leaving leaders to make decisions throughout the year based on stale information.

Most importantly, this top-down approach to culture creates a cycle in which leaders do all the work — setting unrealistic expectations that doom an organization from the start.

I’m a culture guy, so the lion’s share of organizational assessments I’ve seen and led deal specifically with culture. These lessons can be generalized across most organization-wide data collection efforts, however.

Though most companies approach culture assessment and change as described above, creating a strong culture is the ultimate opportunity to take advantage of the wisdom of the crowd. When employees, leaders, and other stakeholders have a say in a company’s culture, the insights that arise are often the most innovative and effective solutions. After all, your employees are closest to the everyday issues in the workplace.

By tapping into and including the input of people at every level of your organization, you start at the beating heart of your company. And by engaging them on a regular basis (rather than once a year), you can leverage that collective intelligence to drive the business forward.

This is the way we at gothamCulture have long approached our work, but the recent trend in social media circles of calling everything “crowdsourcing” made me reconsider why. After all, inviting the crowd into the process can be messy, and tackling any cultural problem is much more than an item on a checklist — but that’s the point.

Looking back on our nine years of work in this space, there are several long-standing beliefs and assumptions worth challenging regarding how organizations do, and should, develop highly functioning cultures.

These myths include (but are not limited to):

1. The experts have all the answers. The days of a small group of “experts” sitting in a war room and coming up with the ultimate solution for the masses are gone. People expect more from their work experience. They want to exercise some level of control in their environment.

When senior leadership teams make decisions in isolation, they do so based on a limited amount of information. It’s one particular version of reality fed to them by others who may have their own agendas. Leaders may think they have an in-depth understanding of issues’ nuances when, in fact, they may be too far removed from what’s really going on to make the most effective decisions.

2.  The people within the organization don’t know what’s best. This is the misguided assumption that drives leaders to rely on “experts” rather than employees in the trenches. Over time, leaders may conclude that people in the organization’s ranks are unable to comprehend the complexities of their everyday tasks, but that’s seldom the truth.

In our work, we’ve found that those closest to the issues oftentimes have the most profound perspectives on them. In many cases, they’ve already figured out solutions and workarounds for some of the organization’s biggest problems. The only reason they haven’t voiced their opinions is because nobody thought to ask — or asked the wrong questions.

3.  Annual surveys and focus groups give us the right information at the right time. How could we ever assume that an organization’s lifeblood — its people — only have something valuable to contribute once a year? The traditional annual survey limits the amount and type of information you can get from stakeholders and reinforces a skewed perception of reality.

Leaders take that information, sort it, and make sweeping changes that affect the entire organization based on a few data points. The collected stories and feelings of various team members, in conjunction with quantitative assessments, result in better conclusions than those arrived at through paper surveys or digital tallies alone.

Successful businesses of the future will leverage technology to drive constant input and feedback from all stakeholders. These continuous feedback loops will increase inclusivity of people and ideas, freeing leaders from relying on annual surveys to drive their decisions. This collective approach will also reveal opportunities and red flags earlier so they can be addressed in a timely manner.

We’re starting to question organizational norms that have existed for decades, and it’s just the beginning. As more Millennials enter the workforce, companies are realizing that today’s stakeholders expect continual involvement, and they’re being forced to adapt quickly to the changing tide.

To successfully evolve and deliver on your stakeholders’ high expectations, you can’t hold on to antiquated practices and continue making decisions based on outdated beliefs and assumptions. Organizations that adapt to leverage new values and the input of their stakeholders will come out on top. They’ll mine the crowd to form a truly accurate sense of their environment, they’ll be better equipped to make more accurate and timely decisions, and they’ll be much more adept at engaging their stakeholders through a collective and crowdsourced organizational culture.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

In rapidly growing companies, hiring and retaining the right employees is one of the hardest things for effective leaders to get right.

On one hand, your company needs the right process in place to hire and keep the right people. There has to be an appealing lure to attract them, and the benefits have to be worthwhile enough to keep them.

On the other hand, the company branding and benefits you offer can only tell them so much of the story. The everyday behaviors that shape your organizational culture will have an ongoing effect on each one of your employees.

It’s important to realize that your people are your company’s most valuable asset, and finding the right “fit” between company and that most valuable asset is paramount to success.

There are bigger things to consider than benefits and bonuses when bringing on new people. Your workforce, particularly the millennial generation, wants to know what your company stands for.  They want to be part of something bigger than themselves.

The way you communicate your benefits and purpose to them from the beginning may be the most important part in setting them up for success.

So, how do you give your new employees an accurate picture of your company’s brand, its values, and their place in the overall picture of the organization?

Here are 3 points to consider when building a sustainable onboarding process for your growing company:

1. Does It Scale?

When you’re small, as in a startup, it’s much easier to find the right people and orient them quickly with the rest of your team.

It’s likely that small companies thoroughly vet their candidates for cultural fit when they hire. But, as an organization grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the same processes. A strategy that works for a group of 20 people may not scale to a company of 200 people.

Make sure your onboarding processes are built to last. Rapidly growing companies who plan ahead of these changes will see more success, particularly as they delegate these onboarding processes to other hiring managers as they grow.

2. What Information Do You Include?

Onboarding and orienting employees is challenging.  Organizations face a balancing act between conveying large quantities of information and keeping new employees engaged and interested.

Considering most employees will only really understand the organization’s culture once they are officially on the job, picking and choosing what information to share during the onboarding process adds to the challenge.

Most people today like to digest snackable information, not an entire meal at once. Consider keeping the information segments of your process short, so employees can take away the bite-size nuggets and figure out where they might want to ask questions to get further insights.

One recent example is Samsung’s orientation rap video that went viral to mixed reviews. While Samsung’s effort to communicate a lot of information in an engaging, short format should be applauded, the execution left something to be desired.

Their video is a perfect example of why it’s so important to keep the context in mind. Your employees are there to be professionals; to further their careers. If your presentation is too slapstick or silly, you risk losing people to it as something that is nonsensical, or not a fit for the organization and its people.

On the other hand, a completely dry delivery of rules, stats, and facts about your company can put your new hires to sleep, causing them to disengage before they start their first shift.

Your challenge is keeping them interested and engaged in a way that both reflects your culture and doesn’t turn people off.

3. What Is The Employee Experience?

Are you sitting your new employees in front of a computer to go through self-directed orientation? Are you personally illustrating your values and guidelines on a whiteboard? Do you partner them with a senior member of your team to learn the ropes?

These first steps of the onboarding process are not just a way to convey information. They also give your brand new employee a taste of what your culture is like on a daily basis.

They can walk away feeling motivated, supported, and comfortable in their new environment, or they can leave feeling overloaded and confused.

Empowering Your People

There’s no doubt that your organizational culture is based largely on the everyday behaviors of your people. Finding the right people who fit into your overall strategy and vision is a challenge in itself. Once you find them, however, your challenge becomes empowering them to carry out your vision to every customer they meet.

It takes more effort than simply putting warm bodies on the sales floor or in the call center. You have to equip them with the right tools to do their job well, carry your vision for success, and feel a purpose behind what they are doing for your company on a daily basis.

“If you take care of your people, your people will take care of your customers and your business will take care of itself.” –JW Marriott

[starbox id=”Cary Paul,Stuart Farrand”]