Joel McKay: Please stop having so many meetings

One man's inside view of the culture of inefficiency in the public sector

‘The first item on the agenda is to discuss the items on the agenda’

By: Joel McKay

Want improved productivity in the public sector? Have fewer meetings.

I’ve had the good fortune to serve in public service at two levels of government and one of the key differences I’ve experienced between my time in the private sector, which included a handful of years at Business in Vancouver newspaper and other community outlets, and now, as a city manager and chair of a university, is the sheer volume of meetings allegedly required to move anything forward.

I’m not the first to raise this issue, but I think at a time of cutbacks, staffing reductions and a broad-based desire to improve Canadian productivity, one of the things the public sector can do is address the culture that contributes to inefficiency.

In other words, it needs to be called out.

Again. And again.

Back in my newsroom days in Vancouver — when newsrooms were still a thing —the editorial staff had one meeting a week to hammer out the stories we chased.

It might’ve lasted 45 minutes, the rest of the week was what a tradesman would call “wrench time” — research, interviews, writing, cursing, more writing, rinse and repeat.

In one instance, the head honchos at Glacier Media called us out to East Van for a four-hour meeting to gain our input on the digital taxonomy required to inventory content during a rebranding project.

I’m still not sure what that means.

We were appalled that anyone thought it was a good idea to use the newsroom’s collective salary costs over a four-hour period to weigh in on something that had nothing to do with putting the paper to bed.

Do the math — it was thousands of dollars.

We were business journalists, so overhead costs were the type of thing we were trained to pay attention to.

Now, here’s what I see in the public sector, where I have also worked as chief executive of a substantial provincial funding agency:

A culture that’s been trained that “getting everyone on board” with an idea is more important than the implementation of the idea.

We now have public servants whose job descriptions include specific responsibilities such as “convening” and “facilitating.”

That’s some fancy-ass jargon for people the taxpayer is paying who have a substantial portion of their job dedicated to going to meetings, not necessarily advancing, implementing, or executing anything.

I’m pretty sure they don’t like it either — few people want to be in a job that’s the metaphorical equivalent of a production line for forwarding ideas that go nowhere.

Look, if you need to get everyone to agree, the meetings will never end.

The real question is who needs to be there?

If they don’t need to be there, don’t invite them.

If you don’t need to be there, tell your supervisor why you think you should be excused.

If you must attend, speak only when it adds value.

Keep it tight.

Besides, silence is a superpower in leadership.

A quick Google search will reveal meeting best practices, so I’m not going to waste your time going over that.

The other cultural issue in the public sector is the increasingly pervasive “cover your ass” syndrome that’s been created from one-too-many public servants being conveniently thrown under the bus when something didn’t go well for a senior leader.

Look, if you’re calling the shots the buck stops with you — blaming your people for poor outcomes is a failure of leadership.

The mistake is yours. Acknowledge it and correct it in a timely manner.

Blaming someone else, even if it was their mistake, erodes trust, morale, and productivity.

This syndrome acutely manifests itself in any public-facing communications.

A colleague not-so-long-ago relayed to me that the preparation of a federal minister’s PowerPoint presentation for an issue that wasn’t controversial required several meetings with more than half a dozen staffers each time to refine wording.

It also required successive discussions and approvals through senior leadership.

This is the normal course of business.

That’s an expensive PowerPoint presentation for the taxpayer, wouldn’t you say?

That’s also an example of a leader who hasn’t bothered to get up to speed on their own files, so the public service shores them up to keep things moving.

Hey, I get it, you have to do it in this business … but it would be a lot cooler if the public service didn’t have too so often.

The other pervasive cultural pattern is the “slow roll” for initiatives that align with current priorities, that everyone agrees are things we should do, but for whatever reason just don’t get the attention of decision makers.

This leaves public servants and their partners having “update” meetings every quarter or two to try and push water uphill.

The underlying problem here is the lack of leaders willing to say “no.”

Here in Quesnel, we’ve been in discussions for years with multiple public-sector entities about land development that everyone agrees is a priority for redevelopment to meet housing targets.

We also have a bridge, which is rusting into a salmon-bearing river, that’s the only reasonable access point to Northern B.C. and that should’ve been replaced when MuchMusic was still a thing.

At this point, if we added up the combined staff time and associated salary costs for all the friendly but unproductive meetings and email exchanges we’ve had to address these issues it would probably eat up a good portion of the costs of the projects themselves.

And those project costs keep rising.

Our problem isn’t a lack of talented, well-educated, good humans that want to work together to achieve better outcomes for Canadians — we have that in spades in this country, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world, I’d wager.

The problem is a culture that’s been socialized to look to government to solve all of society’s problems, successive governments at every level who have been willing to let public sector scope creep beyond traditional jurisdictional boundaries, and a ballooning public service pulled in every direction at once and told to get everyone on board before anything moves forward.

It adds a lot of time and an extraordinary amount of cost to which the taxpayer foots the bill.

And, yes, we have seen announcements recently about public-sector staffing reductions to reduce the financial burden on the taxpayer.

Cool, I guess.

But how come no one has asked how that reduces the workload?

Seems to me you’ve just put more work on the back of fewer public servants.

Either that or you’re going to have to repeal legislation and regulation to reduce the workload, but there’s no sign of that, is there?

Of course, no one has asked because there aren’t many journalists left.

They all work in communications now.

And they’re busy in meetings, vetting PowerPoint presentations.

Joel McKay is a former journalist and public relations leader, current city manager of Quesnel, soon-to-be former chair of the University of Northern British Columbia and the former CEO of Northern Development. He also writes horror novels in his spare time. Please go buy some – www.joelmckay.ca

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