To: All Faculty

Last fall, Christine and I attended a conference on faculty development. One thing the keynote speaker mentioned was that across this nation faculty as a whole complain of feeling “meetinged” to death. The speaker challenged us to determine approximately what it costs our institution to hold all of the various meetings that we are involved in on our campus. One of the items in our current Faculty Strategic Plan involves understanding and improving faculty time usage (Item 11.3e). Below is a table based on the average faculty salary at Carthage for academic year 2004-05, with the average hourly wage determined based on 40 weeks of 40 hrs/wk labor:

Average faculty salary, 04-05 $56,412.00
Average hourly wage (40hrs/40wks) $35.26
Number of faculty in meeting, Average cost/hour
3, $105.77
4, $141.03
5, $176.29
10, $352.58
25, $881.44
75, $2,644.31
100, $3,525.75

The main question the speaker wanted us to ask ourselves was “Are we getting our moneys worth with all of the meetings that we have over the course of the year?” Certainly there is no good way to estimate our hourly value, but the idea of the above example is to try to think in terms of what we accomplish with our meetings based on the cost of having them. The typical departmental meeting costs the institution over $200 dollars. Committee meetings can cost up to $500. Division meetings are typically over $1000 and a faculty meeting where everyone attended would be over $5000. Do you feel like the business we accomplish in our meetings is equal to those values?

What can we do to maximize our meeting value?

The following ideas were reported in the Racine Journal Times (May 28, 2006) based on interviews of the following professionals: Kara DeFrias, instructional designer for a NJ-based insurance company; Linda Dunkel, CEO of Interaction Associates in Cambridge, Mass.; Barbara Streibel, author of “The Manager’s Guide to Effective Meetings” (McGraw-Hill, 2002);

· Do not meet just for the sake of meeting. Just because we have regularly scheduled meeting times does not mean that we have something to meet about. If you have no real agenda, don’t meet.
· There is nothing wrong with a 20 minute meeting. We often have a few items worth meeting about but feel like we have to fill the entire hour and one-half meeting slot. A few items don’t need to be stretched to fill up time. Ask yourself, “Would we be spending this much time on these items if it was 4:30 pm on a Friday?”
· Scrap the traditional agenda. The leader of the meeting can make a list of “desired outcomes” rather than topics for discussion. All participants have a better idea of what needs to be accomplished in the meeting and hopefully can be more prepared and focused in the meeting.
· Rotate the leadership of ongoing meetings. This is not possible in all meetings, but allowing each member to take a turn at leadership tends to make each member value the meetings more. It also empowers individuals who are less involved and can cut down on side conversations as each participant will eventually have their opportunity for structuring the agenda.

I would add that one of the things we may be losing as an institution is the value of the hallway conversation. As we get busier and time becomes more precious we have less time for casual conversation with colleagues that provides opportunities to flesh out issues that need to be decided upon in meetings. Thus meetings become longer and more tedious as we have to flesh out all of the issues in front of everyone in a more formal setting. In fact, Robert’s Rules of Order, which we claim to follow in our meetings, was actually predicated on the idea that most business would occur outside of the meeting, and that meetings provided the opportunity to state your opinion once for the record and then cast a vote on outcome.

We encourage you to work with your colleagues in your various meetings to determine whether your time is being spent most efficiently and effectively. We hope you will find ways to reduce meeting time, and that the time savings will be applied in ways that improve the quality of the institution overall. We also hope this exercise will begin conversations regarding ways to control committee proliferation. Finally, we hope to see you in the hallways and hear what you think!

Sincerely,

Dan Miller