Respect people’s time
Each July 1, at the start of the new fiscal year, the electronic c
alendar at DeKalb Medical is completely blank and has no meetings scheduled on it.
“It’s just wiped clean, and they have to be recreated so that we sunset every meeting in the organization, and it’s only recreated if there’s a conscious decision to recreate it,” Norwood says.
The reason is simple — to not waste people’s time. Often, when you initially form a team to solve a problem, everyone is needed, but as you progress, certain people are no longer needed. Or perhaps you invited someone to come to a meeting once and continued asking that person back, but he or she really isn’t needed there. Or throw the people part aside, and maybe the meeting itself isn’t even needed anymore. All of these situations waste people’s time and affect productivity, so to eliminate these issues, Norwood says to simply cancel all meetings every year.
“We announced it a month ahead and reminded everybody that 30 days from now, everything is going to go blank, and you better start now if you intend to recreate a meeting and who should be in those meetings,” he says. “People are building a culture of if you’re invited to go to a meeting, you have the prerogative to push back and say, ‘Now, why do you need me?’ There’s a cultural collegiality to this, but we’re making the point that your time is valuable — don’t waste it.”
Doing this has helped Norwood and his executive team reclaim the equivalent of about two weeks of time that they can now use doing other things to move the organization forward.
“Killing meetings once a year to re-establish what’s necessary versus what’s superfluous starts to build a culture of let’s not waste time in meetings and waste people sitting around in meetings they’re not contributing to, and hopefully, we can make the ones that do occur more meaningful and more productive,” he says.
And Norwood has found ways to do that, as well. For example, he and his team agreed that the BlackBerry can be a powerful, yet distracting, tool. So they agreed that when they have meetings just among their team, they are permitted to be working on their BlackBerrys as well as participating in the meeting; however, if any other person outside of the core team is present at the meeting, it’s a different story.
“It’s off limits,” he says. “We may not use our BlackBerrys, because that’s not showing respect to the person coming in.”
Additionally, when they had guests for meetings, they used to make that person or group wait until their spot in the agenda, but now they’ve reversed it. If a guest has come for a spot in the agenda, they move that person to the top automatically.
“They get the first slot on the agenda so they can come, do their thing and get back to work,” Norwood says.
They also made a commitment to start every meeting on time and to attempt to end early. By doing all of these things, now even fewer people’s time was being wasted. He says you have to, as a team, identify these kinds of little time-wasters in your organization and make changes so you better respect people’s time and move the organization forward.
“It was just what were the things that made sense to us,” he says. “It was saying them out loud, writing them on a flip chart and reducing them to a list that made sense and looking each other in the eye and saying, ‘OK, we’re going to start living this way,’ and it had a remarkable impact on our culture. It was shocking. I don’t think we were really aware of how much we were being distracted by what Covey would refer to as quadrant-one time instead of quadrant-two time.”
How to reach: DeKalb Regional Health System Inc., (404) 501-1000 or www.dekalbmedical.com
