While team meetings are a crucial part of teamwork, many of them aren’t effective. And there are lots of them. One source that summarized a range of studies calculated that 36 to 56 million meetings occur every day in the United States.9 And yet, in a worldwide Microsoft survey of 38,000 people, 69 percent said their meetings weren’t productive.10 A Harris poll of 2,066 employees even found that almost half of respondents would “prefer to do almost anything else instead of sitting in a status meeting.” Would they rather watch paint dry? A
