Meetings and Managers Kill Company Productivity

Jason Fried is one of the co-founders of 37 signals, a very successful company that creates easy to use and affordable group collaboration software. His target market is small and mid-sized organizations, often working in various geographic locations and companies that need to collaborate with each other yet don’t have the time to have a lot of face to face and online meetings. One of his company’s most popular products is called, Basecamp which provides 24/7, 365 tools to help groups work on projects effieciently. With Basecamp no one gets left out of the information loop and all group material is stored in the cloud easy for everyone to work with it.

In November 2010 Fried gave a 15 minute talk on what he has learned about company productivity and the kinds of things that cause companies to lose a great deal of productivity throughout the day. His research has let him to believe that it is not employees using Facebook several times a day that is killing company productivity, rather it is the lack of solid blocks of time without interruptions from meetings or workers that keep employees from maximizing their productivity.

Fried has this to say about the need for workers, especially creative workers to have long blocks of uninterrupted time to work to get their best work done .

And what you find is that, especially with creative people — designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers — that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time.

To that point, Fried has found that everyone, especially when they are trying to solve complex problems has a different place and time of day that works best for them. It might be very early in the morning for some, while others need to work outside their offices to actually get work done.

Fried maintains, and I certainly agree that meetings, especially with too many people in them are often unproductive. Nothing irritates me more than driving an hour for a collaboration meeting that ends up in a non-productive waste of time. I would much rather use a tool like Basecamp or jump on “Go to Meeting” with a 15-20 minute conference call from my office where our team has an agenda and can actually get work accomplished as a group.

If you can spare about 15 minutes out of your business day, you can watch a presentation that Fried gave in November 2010 discussing his thoughts on worker productivity.

A video of Fried’s discussion can be viewed on the ted.com.

I personally find my most creative time very early in the morning when my mind is not distracted with other things on my “to do” and when the telephone is not distracting me from the work that requires uninterrupted concentration to complete.

The thesis of Fried’s presentation is that companies build expensive offices for their workers to work when certain kinds of workers can be better suited using technology tools and working at a time and place where they can be most productive where meetings and managers are less likely to be a killer of productivity.

Sam Thacker

Sam Thacker is a partner in Austin Texas based Business Finance Solutions.
His direct email address is: sam@lesliethacker.com
Twitter: @SMBFinance

About Jason Myers

Jason Myers is the editor-in-chief of the Texas Entrepreneur Network and can be reached at jason@txenetworks.com