Do meeting-free Fridays work?

This is an interesting article from the Globe and Mail about a pilot project creating Meeting Free Fridays. Just a high level summary: great idea in theory! Gives people time to work uninterrupted on projects on Fridays however those involved in the pilot felt that it was not such as good in practice. No Friday Meetings can slow down the speed of business. The study found people were sneaking off to meet!

When you dig deep, it is important to understand what all of those interviewed echoed - workers need time to think and work without interruptions including email, phone and meetings, even if it is as little as one hour.


KIRA VERMOND
Globe and Mail Update
November 8, 2008 at 6:00 AM EST

‘They're dull. They're too long. Someone always hijacks the conversation. Too many people are invited. And they're not always the right people.”
Ask the average cube monkey to wax poetic on his or her feelings about business meetings, and chances are you'll hear these common complaints plus one more: With so many meetings scheduled, who has time to actually sit down and work any more?
No wonder companies from mammoth IBM to smaller tech firm Ottawa-based Protus have either encouraged or flirted with the concept of Meeting-free Fridays. Still others, such as Xerox and Intel, are doing what they can to offer employees ways to find chunks of uninterrupted time, whether by trying out “quiet time” or e-mail-free hour pilot projects.
“Over all, meetings get a pretty bad rap. So if people knew they had a day without meetings, they would probably be happy,” admits Dee Kelsey, co-author of Great Meetings! Great Results.
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Elaine Mah at Intel's Toronto-area offices (Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail)
But are workers up to the challenge of going meeting-free, phone-free and e-mail-free even for 60 minutes?
Finding Time
That's exactly what Intel Corp. decided to find out when it launched two pilot projects last year. One involved 300 engineers in the U.S. who were required to adhere to a “quiet time” policy. They had to turn off their e-mail, send messages to voice mail and go meeting-free for a few hours on Tuesday mornings.
“It was really an opportunity to put up the walls around them so they could really sit down and have that uninterrupted span of time for thinking and design,” says Elaine Mah, Canadian business marketing manager for Intel Canada in Toronto who has studied the results. “They could finish a thought from A to Z.”
The pilot was a success, she says. Forty-five per cent of survey respondents found that they had markedly improved productivity. And 71 per cent suggested that Intel consider extending the policy to more employees.
Meanwhile, the other project wasn't nearly as popular. For that one, employees were asked to limit their e-mail use on Fridays. Only 29 per cent claimed they experienced the same degree of increased productivity.
Still, says Ann Gomez, a productivity consultant and president of Clear Concept Inc. in Toronto., avoiding the multitasking monster is important even if that vibrating BlackBerry makes it seem like an impossible task.
“People have the best intentions. They're trying to be available and responsive to their peers, but if we're true to what our jobs are, they require us to be working quietly as well,” she says.
On the sly
But what if employees need to communicate and it happens on a Friday? Tom Johansmeyer, a former management consultant in New York, remembers a chief information officer at a company he once worked for who was concerned about the number of meetings his team was having. He instituted Meeting-free Fridays. The result? The IT team snuck away to meet on the sly.
“We would usually try to find one [meeting room] as far away as we could from the CIO's office so we wouldn't get caught,” he says.
There were other drawbacks, too.
“Nobody could get conference rooms. They were booked solid from Monday to Thursday,” Mr. Johansmeyer says. “You had to make serious plans in advance.”
Eventually the policy got scrapped after six months as more trivial meetings suddenly, suspiciously, became more pressing.
“The definition of ‘urgent' started the change. At first it would be life-or-death on Fridays. Eventually it came to mean life-and-discomfort, then life-and-headache. And finally it just became part of life again,” he says.
No formal announcement of the program's demise was made.
Better meetings
Maybe the problem isn't too many meetings, though. Maybe it's just that too many managers run bad meetings, says Phil Symchych, president of Symchych Consulting Inc., in Regina, Sask.
“They're running away from the problem instead of running to the solution,” he says.
So what makes for a good meeting? Good ones should have a purpose statement, including who is being gathered and for what reason. People should also be clear on what needs to be accomplished during that time and when they leave, have an action plan in hand stating deadlines and who is responsible for each task.
“Look at sports teams. They tend to have good meetings on the sidelines in the huddle. Why? They have a deadline and people measuring the score. Everybody is clear about their roles,” Mr. Symchych says.
What shouldn't managers do? Call a meeting for the sake of calling a meeting, says author Ms. Kelsey.
“Groups lock in meetings. It's the staff meeting every Tuesday or the managers' meeting every Thursday. Nobody stops to say, ‘Do we really need a meeting?'” she says.
Be realistic
But maybe your crew is simply all talked out. Maybe a general communication timeout would make sense. Just take it slowly, advises Ms. Gomez. Start with an hour or two, not an entire day.
“Meeting-free Fridays; I know that's a sexy concept that pulls people in, but meeting-free chunks of time are easier to implement,” she says.
Mr. Symchych agrees, saying hacking off 20 per cent of the workweek for quiet time all in one go might be too ambitious. Besides, like an exercise program, an equal number of smaller chunks of time can work, too.
“You're setting up discipline and a habit. The next thing you know you're getting lots done,” he says.
Special to The Globe and Mail
The Upside:
“We are evolving into a stronger and greater knowledge economy. So if you're thinking for a living, getting that thinking time is so precious.” – Elaine Mah, Canadian business marketing manager for Intel Canada in Toronto
The Downside:
“Immediately after this kind of an announcement, you feel that you've been liberated. You're thinking, ‘Alright! No more meetings on Fridays. I can get some work done and I can get out at a reasonable hour.' But nobody had that feeling. Instead, it was, ‘Oh man. Now we have to cram in all of that stuff into four days.'” – Tom Johansmeyer, a former management consultant in New York