Too many bad meetings? : the meeting culture in Icelandic software companies

Abstract

One of the major challenges in today’s organizations is communication. Communication is a critical factor when it comes to gaining mutual understanding, raise concerns and make important decisions, not to mention to support good team spirit and unity. One of the most important types of communication are meetings. Meetings are of all shapes and sizes, planned or unplanned, distant or face to face. The goal of this paper is to examine employee experiences and attitudes towards their organizational meetings with a focus on the software industry. Is, in fact, too much time and money spent on ineffective meetings in the industry today? To answer this, software company employees answered questions and gave their view on a few statements that indicate if their organization is using the best practices when it comes to running good meetings. A special focus was on comparing Agile meetings to other company meetings in those companies that claim to be using Agile in their day to day operation. First results indicate that people find their Agile meetings to be more effective than other meetings within the organization. They have a clearer agenda, clearer output, better follow-up and better facilitation than non-Agile meetings. They also find their time better spent at Agile meetings. Only around 20% of subjects agree on the fact that they find their time well spent on non-Agile meetings at Agile companies.