The NYT just ran a great article about too many meetings, and what to do to help trim the fat. What do you think about having all the participants stand during the meeting? Seems like you might reach consensus faster!
A few years ago, the YSM Web Group identified that it was taking on average 15 meetings to build a website. This seemed excessive. This was just one of many meetings we have, but because it was a discreet, predictable kind of meeting with a specific outcome, we could identify it as a problem with parameters and work to make it better. We approached the issue with flexibility (what can we do better? What can we ask to have ahead of time? Can we have a checklist instead of open-ended questions?) and came up with a way to do the website building process with two meetings instead of fifteen.
Imagine the cost savings in staff time. Fifteen meetings with four people (many meetings often had many more people in this process) equals 60 hours. If the average pay and fringe of those four people is $60k (this is a low estimate), that means each participant is making about $30 during that hour, which means each hour is costing Yale $120. This puts the total staff time for that project at $1,800, and that is just for the meetings.
The same amount of work is now accomplished with staff time costing $240. That's a pretty big savings for Yale, especially given that there can be hundreds of projects like this in a year.
Meetings are not a waste of time, but having meetings where there is nothing on the agenda, no consensus is reached, and nothing is accomplished? Well...it might be time to improve.