If a secretary tells you that CEO expects to be busy in meetings for next six hundred years, call your broker and sell stock short. Any company unable to manage an activity that should last an hour is on its way down financial tubes.

Although it’s true that senior executives spend much of their time in meetings, you can bet that a business is in trouble if their meetings are out of control.

Surveys show companies waste an average of 20% of their payroll on bad meetings. And that’s just beginning of problem. Meetings keep people away from tasks they were hired to perform -- tasks that make money for company and keep business ahead of competition.

Since bad meetings are so wasteful, you may wonder why anyone tolerates them. Unfortunately, many business leaders think that their meetings are just fine. They even believe that they’re experts at holding effective meetings.

For example, when I phone companies to ask if they would be interested in improving their meetings, I sometimes encounter an assistant who assures me that executives believe that they hold wonderful meetings. Then assistant snickers, coughs softly, and regains enough composure to state that they don’t need my services. At this point assistant sounds like someone on a sinking ship who is throwing a life jacket into water.

And that must make you wonder: why any intelligent person would hold a meeting that wastes everyone’s time and produces nothing.

There are easy answers such as 1) they don’t know that their meetings could be effective, 2) they don’t know what an effective meeting is like, or 3) they don’t know how to hold an effective meeting.

But what about rest of them? That is, what about all of executives who know how to plan and organize and run an effective business, but still hold bad meetings?

Let’s dig deeper. These executives actually want to hold bad meetings because they prove to be useful. Here’s how.

Here’s how to hold an effective staff meeting.

1) In general. Keep them short. Most staff meetings should last less than an hour. You want your staff to spend their time working on things that earn money for your business, not sitting in meetings. Keep them positive. Negative meetings contain insults, ridicule, and attacks. These activities create caution and resentment, which always costs your company money. Keep them interactive. Your staff consists of intelligent people. Put them to work in your meetings to advance effectiveness of your organization.

2) Share news. Give members of your group one minute to report on progress made in their area of responsibility. You’ll find that this results in bullet point reports of essential information. It also prevents people from philosophizing, explaining, justifying, criticizing, and engaging in other unproductive activities. Plan a time budget: 8 to 10 minutes.