Meeting-etiquette misalignment

Right now, some of your employees are sitting in meetings that they shouldn’t have been invited to. They’re there because they always attend meetings when invited, and stay until the end, so as not to offend anyone.  

Our data show that this applies to nearly 10% of tech-company team members.   

If your company’s culture considers attending meetings until the end (even it provides no added value) as being polite, then fine. However, 91% of senior leadership members have the opposite view, expecting people to leave meetings when they are not relevant, with no hard feelings.   

As you are reading these lines, your company is wasting expensive and precious hours, as it does every week, on meeting-etiquette misalignment. This isn’t surprising, given the fact that most companies don’t clearly define their meeting etiquette. Instead, they leave their teams to behave according to the personal manners, which often aren’t suited to the tech company’s challenges. While letting people bring their own etiquette to the workplace is not necessarily a bad idea, misalignment in this situation is inevitable. 

People who don’t walk out of irrelevant meetings due to manners are also likely to be offended when teammates walk out of their meetings.

So, the risk here is double: the wasting of precious time, and the creation of tension among colleagues who have conflicting senses of what’s right. 

By aligning your team in this simple, but impactful, area, you can save multiple workplace hours and avoid unnecessary team friction.