I've had conference calls blow through 160 minutes, sadly.

Admittedly I've never been very high up the executive food chain, but in my 45 years of working experience, I have never once found a conference call to be the least bit worthwhile.

Is it just me, or do conference calls actually accomplish something given the right circumstances?

tanstaafl.

It is not just you.

The more people you have on a call (or meeting), the less that'll actually get done.

Depending on the people who are running the call, the tools used in concert with the call, and the content of the meeting, they can be worthwhile. We use the conference calls with Viz (or WebEx if it is internal only) so people can actually see the data being discussed.

I would much rather spend those 6 hours in a telecon every other month or so than spending 12 flying/driving to get to that meeting. The same information gets shared and the same decisions are reached over the conference call as they would have been face to face.

Which is to say: none.

Personally, I find an email thread 100 times more useful. For one thing, it gives people an opportunity to formulate an idea rather than just blurting out the first thing that pops into their heads.

That may be the difference there. We use these meetings mainly to support an event planned for 2011 (a qualification event).

At these meetings, no decisions are made on the spot - we have the time and necessity to do this right. When a decision is required, the problem is presented then until the next meeting email traffic takes place discussing it, next meeting a synopsis of the choices, then the next meeting is when a decision is reached. We aren't constrained by fast timelines so nothing spur of the moment occurs. If that happened and all the interested parties didn't agree or accept the solution, qualification wouldn't occur.

Under these circumstances, conference calls work out great.

I do find that videoconferences (but not, really, voice-only teleconferences) help mitigate this effect, even if actual decisions don't get made.

Peter

Sometimes, that's true, but not always. I was part of a conference call last week, which was very useful -- far more so than the corresponding email thread. We needed resolution on something, and it was dragging out forever via email. A 45 minute conference call took care of it, and everyone was clear on what was going on. And, for what it's worth, it also involved a significant amount of brainstorming, and blurting out the first thing that popped into our heads.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why an email thread was so useless -- someone on one end would spend a long time crafting a reply with their idea, which had a hole glaringly obvious to the person on the other end. But it would take a few days to get a reply, along with another idea. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Sometimes, an honest to goodness conversation is just plain better than email.

If nothing comes from a meeting, then the person running the meeting didn't do their job correctly. (And yeah, I've been that guy, sometimes.)