Or better still, the government should form yet another ministry with a minister, two deputies and three ministers of state who would flower that ministry with pomp and pageantry for whatever it is worth. Periodically, they would deliver speeches, with the mass media in full attendance to give superb coverage.

Now, on a serious note: Here is the challenge for organisational leaders and those who care deeply about the organisations they work for. Conduct the arithmetic of meetings held in your organizations. Put a cost to it. For a start, consider these rudimentary conservative estimates. Supposing 10 high-level staff members of a government ministry, each earning an average monthly net income of GH¢1,500, meet once every week for two hours.

Typically, the meetings start late, and could drag on for four or more hours. The cost of meetings includes entertainment, item 13, sitting allowance, transportation as well as the preparation toward the meeting, not to mention the aftermath cleaning up and organizational recovery. Petty high-life expenses and trash talk: Priceless! The result of this exercise per organization could run into a chunk of money.

Meetings are beneficial but they cost organizations money. But do we use meetings wisely? Could our attitude towards meetings be considered yet another wrinkle on our national journey toward development? As the adage goes, time is money. Executive time is even bigger money so when members of organizations spend much precious time at unproductive meetings, the act constitutes a high cost to those organizations.

Here are some observations I’ve made on visits to state organisations. Some people are professional meeting busy-bodies who are almost never at their desks. Some appear to get adrenaline rush as they rush from one meeting to another. Could one assume that such people actually pretend to be very busy, a mere exercise in mimicry of working while they do little to add value to organizational bottom-line?

I dug a bit deeper into this phenomenon and discovered some disturbing trends. Meeting hoppers abound in the system. Like the mafia, you are likely to meet the same people all over the place, attending meetings. Relentlessly, some pursue opportunities to be placed on anything with a semblance of a board and/or a committee. Never mind that some of the meetings have no relevance to their work, or they personally have no role to play; or even that their participation does not contribute anything to organizational or national development. The issue is that their sorrowful black bottoms love any other seats but their own official chairs!

Unlike rolling stones which is said not to gather any moss, the meeting-hoppers collect allowances and any benefits they can grab left right and centre. It is like going fishing while also looking for their bread to be buttered! The worst part is that typically, some meeting-hoppers do not report back to their organizations the outcomes of the meetings even if they went as direct representatives of those organizations. Furthermore, their continuous absence from work create unnecessary vacuum, leaving official work hanging, perpetually unattended to.

And then there is the trash talking! Recently, I arrived 15 minutes early at one meeting; other attendees were up to 30 minutes late. That was my first red flag of caution. Then the meeting began. There was no written agenda: my second red flag. Half-way during the two-hour duration, the meeting degenerated into discussions of unrelated topics and the exchange of silly jokes. Two male participants shamelessly slipped in some profanities for what they probably thought was comic relief. Needless to say, I did not honour a second invitation to attend another meeting with these folks since I did not want to spend my time in a lousy chatter shop.

You might relate to some of the descriptions above from meetings you’ve attended – the lateness, the lackadaisical attitudes, the off-topic digressions, the egoistic attitudes of showing off who-is-who.

Meetings are habit forming. When meetings become your pastime, you’ll not realise that you attend meetings just to schedule dates and times for yet more meetings. You might unintentionally conjure up agenda items to justify the next meeting to fill up your calendar. Some meetings are convened at the drop of a hat, or the slap of a memo.

Meetings can easily become a key avoidance strategy not to do the real work that you are paid to do. If organizations are to institute and enforce accountability for the output of meetings as they relate to the corporate bottom line, most of the meetings held on a daily basis throughout Ghana might be called off altogether, or at the least, reassessed. Too many meetings translate into lost productivity.

Some meetings are prolonged unnecessarily. Some are devoid of useful content; others are held just for the sake of meeting. A manager might convene a meeting to discuss issues which could have been decided by one or two people. When mundane announcements and issues are given more time and prominence at meetings, significant content cannot get through.

Meetings have political dimensions too. On the surface, you would be tempted to think that meetings are held to encourage employee participation and to proudly practice democracy at the workplace. Wrong! Most people don’t contribute any opinions at meetings. They do not add any value. They just constitute a passive audience who simply sit there to listen to what a few people have to say, that is – if they succeed in remaining alert, awake, and their thoughts do not wander back and forth to more pressings issues in their private lives. After all, although adults have occupations, they also have pre-occupations and their pre-occupations can easily overwhelm their occupations!

You might remember some meetings you’ve attended which were characterised by unfruitful wrangling about small matter by a few outspoken persons who just love to hear their own voices. At the end, you might have felt that your time was wasted and you might consider not attending this kind of meeting again in the future. Or, you might cultivate the habit of lowering your expectations for any useful outcomes from meetings. From that point onwards, the outcome of meetings could become self-fulfilling prophesies.

At the end of a meeting, you would expect that issues would have been resolved. Wrong again. Not much can be accomplished if so much time is spent discussing petty issues, prolonging topics unnecessarily, or arguing incessantly. Meetings constitute one of the mirrors through which you can see an organization. Pettiness, distractions, ineffective communicative practices, silly jokes, cliques and such show their ugly heads and faces at meetings.

Without a doubt, the National Commission on the Study of Multiple Corporate Encounters (NCSMCE) will have a lot of work to do. Good luck. Please don’t consider me for membership. I’m down with malaria and a bad toothache!

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