With lunches and meetings cancelled en masse because of the volcano, offices became sane, efficient places

THE ERUPTION of Eyjafjallajökull had some unfortunate consequences last week. Airlines lost billions in revenues; stranded passengers lost tempers and sleep; Kenyan flowers lost their bloom; and Dannii Minogue lost her new maternity clothes, which were being flown in from Hong Kong.

Yet in spite of these losses, there were some sweeping but unreported gains whose impact will be felt long after passengers have collapsed into their own beds and Dannii has been reunited with her clothes.

For offices all over the western world, last week was one of the sanest and most productive for a very long time. On Monday, people got to work to find half the appointments logged into their BlackBerrys suddenly cancelled.

In normal times, I find the mere cancellation of a stray lunch enough to make me feel happy and lucky all day long. Last week, lunches and meetings were cancelled en masse as people were stranded halfway across the world.

Midweek, the self-styled philosopher Alain de Botton mused on Twitter: “There are meetings which, when cancelled at the last minute, give one an ecstatic feeling of having cheated death for a little longer.”

I wouldn’t have put it quite so portentously, but I agree with the sentiment. A cancelled meeting is even better than a cancelled lunch, as the latter usually has to be rescheduled later. A cancelled meeting is a net productivity gain: it tends to go away altogether.

The volcano proved what we know already: office work is more inefficient than schoolwork. Last Thursday, my son’s dreaded French test was cancelled due to a no-show by the teacher, but because boys need to learn the passé composé, it will take place this week instead.

But with meetings, as there is little to be learnt, there are seldom consequences when they fail to take place.

Still more telling was the contrast between schools and offices when lessons and meetings went ahead sparsely attended. The children who missed learning about simultaneous equations will have to catch up; absent office workers not only do not need to catch up, but the meetings ran smoother without them. I went to a meeting on Tuesday where the number of people in attendance was reduced from about 12 to eight. Never have proceedings gone faster.

Even more miraculous was what the volcano did to business conferences. At the time when it was erupting, a lawyer I know was speaking at a conference on cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The audience stopped even pretending to listen and instead were panicking about how they were going to get across borders themselves that evening.

Last week many conferences were cancelled entirely. Personnel Today carried the following story: “The travel chaos caused by the volcanic eruption in Iceland has hit the heart of the HR community, with the CIPD forced to cancel the first day of its IFTDO conference.” Which sounds like pretty good news to me.

Conferences are one of the greatest mysteries of business life. I often ask people who go to a lot of them if they have ever learnt anything. They nearly always say no, but add that the point is the hobnobbing. This is a feeble argument: the hobnobbing would have to be unimaginably good to justify such a waste of time and money.

As well as meetings and conferences, business trips were up the spout last week, too.

A friend called on Monday to say that a vital trip to Dubai had been cancelled. But by Wednesday, after three enforced days in the office, he was claiming to have had his most productive week in years.

For once he’d been able to talk to his team and find what they were up to, read his e-mails properly and even had a new idea. And rather than let the idea wither and die, he had time to follow it through.

Will we learn anything from this? Will we learn that offices can function better with fewer people – so long as there are fewer meetings, conferences and business trips?

Early reports are not encouraging. By Friday the productivity gains enjoyed by those who worked through last week were already being undermined as some of the volcano refugees started to return to their desks.

Instead of sitting down to absorb the lessons learnt in their absence, they were distracting the workers who had held the fort so admirably, telling their travel-delay stories over and over again, like the Ancient Mariner. – (Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010)