The meeting is scheduled for 2:00pm. At 2:00pm, three people are present. By 2:03pm, two more have joined. At 2:05pm, someone says "let's give it another minute." At 2:07pm, the meeting starts.
This happens in almost every workplace, in almost every meeting, almost every day. It is so consistent that it has become an informal norm: meetings start five minutes late.
Why it happens
Back-to-back scheduling. When meetings are scheduled consecutively, people are physically or mentally still in the previous meeting when the next one starts. The five-minute delay is the transition time that was not built into the schedule.
The social contract of waiting. Starting without everyone present feels rude. So the people who arrived on time wait for the people who did not. The people who arrive late are not penalized. The people who arrived on time are penalized with five minutes of waiting.
Technical setup. Someone's audio is not working. Someone cannot find the link. Someone is sharing their screen for the first time on this device. These are predictable problems that are treated as surprises every time.
What it costs
Five minutes per meeting. If you attend six meetings a day, that is thirty minutes of waiting. Across a team of ten people, that is three hundred minutes — five hours — of collective time spent waiting for meetings to start.
Per week: twenty-five hours. Per year: over a thousand hours of collective time spent waiting for meetings to begin.
How to start on time
- Start at the scheduled time. Not five minutes later. The people who arrived on time deserve to have their time respected. Latecomers can catch up.
- State this norm in advance. "We start at 2:00" in the invite sets the expectation. Most people will adjust.
- Build transition time into the schedule. Schedule meetings for fifty minutes instead of sixty. The five-minute buffer becomes the transition time.
- Test your audio before the meeting, not during it. This is a small habit with a large collective benefit.
The norm shift: In organizations where meetings consistently start on time, people consistently arrive on time. The norm is self-reinforcing in both directions. The direction it goes depends on which behaviour is rewarded.