Stephen Butler draws attention to the true cost of people showing up late to online meetings, and the cumulative value of showing up on time.
‘We’re still waiting for a few people to join.’
This is not politeness.
It’s hard to imagine a phrase more devastating to team culture—with ripple effects that can cumulatively cost organizations millions.
The dollar cost of making those that have joined the meeting on time may be trivial.
The true cost is the messages it sends:
‘Your time isn’t worth as much as those who haven’t bothered to show up.’
Or even:
‘You should have been late, too.’
Of course, some are more time-pressed than others. Senior leaders and sales personnel are more likely on average to find themselves in back-to-backs. It’s typically easier to be late for your next call than to extricate yourself from the last one.
Some joke about it. At my first job, the concept of “BCG time” was that our partners lived in a time zone five minutes later than Eastern Standard.
Some clients found that funny—the first time.
Other orgs have tried to rejig their rules around their leaders’ “time zone.” Recently I had a meeting with a MAAMA company that sought to address the problem by having all meetings start ten minutes after the hour.
The result? Latecomers now showed up at a quarter after, while others claimed that they had to split five early for an outside call—reducing meetings scheduled for an hour to barely 40 minutes.
The good news: This is an opportunity.
In my practice, clients interested in changing or tuning culture often wonder what levers in their, if any, lie within their control.
Invariably I point to meetings.
It’s become fashionable to trash them—especially among leaders working the longest weeks, who already know (or think they know) most of what’s to be discussed.
The truth is, meetings define organizations.
Meetings are where most staff, including mid level managers, get information required to do their work, and to learn from their seniors. Employees are also the eyes and ears of the organization: they are there to relay essential information to the upper level brain.
The way we ask people to prepare, show up, participate and follow-through sets the tone not only for how communication and decisions happen, but how the whole organization creates value.
The more you hate meetings, the more important it is to show up on time, demonstrating the kind of commitment you expect from those on your payroll, and the kind of engagement that drives real productivity growth.
If you can’t do that for whatever reason, at least make sure of this:
Insist everyone else starts without you.