How to Cut Project-Related Meeting Time in Half Without Losing Productivity

Meetings eat time and resources, keeping people from doing productive work. How can you keep everyone in the loop without excessive meetings? Here are some strategies. 

People love to grumble, “That meeting could have been an email,” as their time and productivity is consumed by emergency status meetings and other mandatory workplace gatherings. But that’s a myth. Emails often go unanswered, unnoticed, and ignored.  

The productivity loss and cost of meetings are real. According to one study, the average organization invests over $80,000 in meetings per employee per year and employees spend an average of 18 hours every week sitting in them. Many of those meetings are spontaneous and serve to put out fires. The same survey found that employees report they could have skipped at least five hours of meetings a week as long as they were kept in the loop. 

Why meetings happen: what’s the root cause? 

Many meetings are little more than status updates. Project teams meet because they don’t have a better way to assign work, track progress, or report when tasks, milestones, or project deadlines are at risk – or completed. They don’t trust that emails will be read, that the right people will be kept in the loop, or that the work will be completed. 

Meetings – when carefully curated and managed – are great for brainstorming, problem solving, decision making, and creating a sense of community, culture, and belonging. They can be time consuming, requiring follow up, clarify decisions, and track work assignments, which often leads to more meetings.  

The real problem isn’t the meetings—it’s the lack of a smarter system to handle what the meetings are trying to fix.  

Luckily, Moovila offers a solution. 

Facilitating Work Assignments 

Moving your project workflows out of siloed tools, emails, and spreadsheets can create a domino effect and bump many of the most tedious meetings off your schedule. 

Work assignments, for example, are often part of planning and status meetings. However, meetings are a flawed way to accomplish these objectives. Some people are outgoing and end up with assignments because they are hard to miss while more reticent people are overlooked. 

This leads to imbalanced resource allocation and job discontent from both personalities. 

Moovila offers a robust resource capacity analysis tool so you can see who has the skills and capacity for the work you need to assign. The list might be the same faces you would see in a meeting, but it is based on people’s schedules, skills, and availability. You can assign work to a team member with a few clicks, and it will show up as a pending task in their workspace without interrupting their work.  

This resource allocation format eliminates the need for time spent in meetings – all in a few clicks.  

Clarity on work progress 

Meeting with the team to get status updates on the progress of work is tedious. Save your meeting time for problem solving and building detailed work plans instead. If everyone checks tasks off when they complete them, the team can glance at the project’s Critical Path view to easily understand how the project is progressing, and everyone stays in the loop without attending additional meetings.  

Moving your project planning into a connected tool also automatically alerts people when their work is imminent or overdue and makes it easy to update the entire team when work is completed. There is no need for the PM to call a status meeting because it is clear – in the glanceable critical path visual – when a project shows signs of risk. 

Once you create a project, and fine tune it as you execute the work, you will have a template you can use to build a work plan for that type of work going forward, which saves planning time down the road.  

Data for your post-mortem 

Postmortems are important. At the end of a project, you should take some time to brainstorm the ways it could have gone better, examine mistakes your team could learn from, and reward people for a job well done. Those meetings will be speedy and effective if you review your template performance using Moovila Perfect Project’s Template Analytics beforehand.  

This tool compares your work estimates to reality. Knowing how well the project performed against your estimates can help you address scoping issues you might not otherwise be aware of.  

For example, maybe you are estimating that a task takes two hours, but it actually takes your team an average of four hours. Knowing this information can explain why tasks run late or team members are working longer hours than anticipated. Template analytics will call out these differences and suggest beneficial change. Maybe one person consistently takes too long? 

Once you understand what’s slowing down your projects or eating at your margins, you can update the template to match reality, so future projects are scoped more accurately. Your margins will thank you!  

An early warning system for problems 

What if a hurricane were to hit without warning. You would think everything was fine until the trees started blowing over. Fortunately, Moovila flags risks before they become an issue using RPAX Risk Detection and Remediation. 

Let’s say you learn in a stand-up meeting that someone is having a family emergency that will pull them away from work for a few days. After the meeting, it takes you a couple of days to find time to comb through your projects and calculate how this emergency will affect your project portfolio and resourcing. Identifying risk, then remediating the risk while managing other work is a big ask. A large burden for any human, so leave it to RPAX to remediate these risks before they become a problem. 

An automated critical path 

Some people view work in a Gantt chart. Others rely on a timeline. Some prefer boards or calendars. But professional project managers swear by the Critical Path view because it shows them every task and their dependencies– with start and finish dates – on a timeline toward project completion. There is no meeting that will give you this kind of clarity into your workflow. However, it’s difficult to correctly account for dependencies, durations, resources, and work estimates of every task in a project.  

That’s why our artificial intelligence is dedicated to creating this detailed timeline. The Critical Path does all the math, generates suggestions when project plans require change, and shows you a live Critical Path view – with any risks or problems highlighted in red – whenever you want. 

When you do meet with your team to discuss projects, you’ll likely be planning for future projects or conducting a post-mortem. With the Critical Path view in front of you, say goodbye to excessive status meetings or putting out project fires during emergency meetings.   

Interested in seeing how Moovila can cut your project teams’ meeting times in half? Request a demo here with our sales team.