People rarely complain about their job. But they do complain about their work. What I mean is that most people actually like what they do for a living. It is the peripherals of work – meetings, poor communication, unfairness, personality clashes – which get them down.

I call these the frustration of work and they prevent us being our best and contributing as much as we would like to our organisation. They lead to poor ideas, poor decisions and poor implementation which is costly both to the company itself and, in terms of confidence, loyalty, enthusiasm and well-being, to employees.

However, it isn’t all doom and gloom. You can make work work better no matter how junior (or senior) you are by tackling these frustrations head on. Instead of complaining about them, do something about them.

Frustration 1: Waste-of-time meetings

We spend, on average, 37% of our time in meetings and 30-50% is considered to be a waste of time.

1.   Separate operational from strategic issues. Operational meetings should be held weekly and strategic meetings should be held monthly. Being ruthless about this separation means you will spend less time in meetings overall but relatively more time working on strategy, meaning issues get dealt with before they become urgent and require fire-fighting.

2.   Hold daily check-ins with your team. Sixty to 90 seconds per person to update on priorities of the day prevents overlap and confusion.

3.   Encourage conflict not consensus. The real value of meetings is exploring and debating conflicting opinions and ideas.

4.   Meetings which are purely designed to update the chair are a poor use of time. Chances are 90% of it is not of value to you. Explore other ways to share information or keep updates short.

5.   Do you add value or get value from every meeting you attend? Either influence the agenda to ensure they are valuable for you or, if you can’t, discuss with the chair whether you are needed at all.

6.   Create ground rules together. Ten or 15 minutes at the start of the meeting clarifying what behaviour is acceptable and unacceptable means if people start dominating proceedings, making personal remarks or simply hiding in the corner hoping they won’t be noticed, everyone present has the right to call them to account.

7.   Turn phones off, and laptops. And that includes the chair. Except in exceptional circumstances, you should be fully present. If you aren’t, the meeting probably isn’t meeting your needs. Why are you even there?  

8.   Shake meetings up. There is no reason why they need to be held in the same venue or that you must sit in the same seat. Bring life to meetings by ringing the changes.

9.   Use them as learning opportunities. If nothing else, use meetings to try out skills you learnt at a recent workshop or that you read in a recent article. Ask questions, observe body language, push yourself to speak more (or less).

10. Remember, you don’t have to revolutionise the meetings throughout your company. Just improving one or two meetings you attend can make a big difference to how you spend your time, which in turn has got to be good for business.

Blaire Palmer’s new book What’s Wrong with Work? The five frustrations of work and how to fix them for good, is published by John Wiley & sons, £12.99. To take part in the debate about work visit Blaire’s blog www.whatswrongwithwork.co.uk or www.tamingtigers.com