The Secret To Better Meeting Attendance: The Day You Wind The Clocks

August 5, 2013

The Day You Wind the Clocks

During the Q&A session of a presentation to a large group of business owners, someone asked, “What is the best day to have a meeting in which you will have the greatest number of participants?”  I mulled over this question for a bit, until I realized that the answer, while scarcely practiced, has been around for centuries.

Whether through conventional wisdom, habit, or tradition, most enterprises hold their sales team or staff meetings on Monday mornings.  This could possibly be the worst day to have a meeting. Almost all US holidays are now on Mondays, people often extend long weekends, employees come in tired from the weekend, and most road warriors attend through a cell phone tucked under their chin while wading their way through throngs of TSA lines.

For centuries before electricity, people used clocks that had to be wound or reset on a weekly basis.  In the business world most people rewound their clocks on Wednesdays. They chose this midweek marker for two key reasons:

1. This is the day they could be almost certain someone would be in the office to do the resetting.
2. There are very few holidays that fall on Wednesday, and even if they did, they could push the task to Tuesday or Thursday.

Borrowing from history we can apply this technique to scheduling our own meetings.  Beyond the fact that on Wednesday there’s no sense of “weekend mode” like on Monday’s and Friday’s, it’s the best day to have a meeting because:

1. Most people are in full business mode and have the right mindset on Wednesday.
2. They have had Monday and Tuesday for closing actions to prepare for reporting on Wednesday.
3. Having a meeting on Wednesday allows Thursday and Friday to be used for a new approach or corrective action that will yield results before the week is over.
4. It’s a light professional travel day.
5. It provides a great mid-week break in routine.
6. Few people take Wednesday as a holiday or vacation extension day.
7. It has the psychological benefit of being “hump” day.

For an added bonus, try having a standing, working or lunch meeting on Wednesday to make attendance and participation even greater.  If there is food, they will come.  Besides, who says meetings have to be boring, monotonous, or unproductive “what I did this week” status reports?  Add some extra flare where you can.

Proper timing and some additional energizing ingredients will help drive attendance to those necessary meetings and make more efficient use of everyone’s time.

Keep an eye out for the next post in which we’ll discuss how to energize sales meetings into catalysts for closings and accelerating profitable revenue growth.