It turned out that employees thought they were meeting in the office. Stack didn't know where the office was. She called, but the organizer was on vacation.

Forty-five minutes late, Stack found her way to the office conference room.

"They thought it was a test,"she told an audience on June 27 at the Society for Human Resources Professionals conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It wasn't, but it provided a valuable lesson: "How much money did the company pay to sit in the room for 45 minutes?"

Bad meetings happen all the time. Among groan-worthy stories with some a-ha solutions, Stack encouraged audience members to change company culture and "end meeting madness."Here are some of her pointers:

• Only hold a meeting if it's necessary.

Meetings should be held to communicate emotional, ambiguous, long or difficult messages, said Stack, who runs a company called The Productivity Pro in Highlands Ranch, Colo. The most ineffective meetings involve mere transfer of information, like somebody reading out loud from PowerPoint slides, or a roundtable of committee updates. On the other hand, sometimes nuances in anger or sarcasm are lost in e-mail, and a meeting would have been better.

"The problem is there are too many ways to communicate, and people just use their preference,"she said.

• Put effort into finding the best time to meet.

Go so far as asking employees to graph their energy levels through the day. If most people seem to be "up"at 10 a.m., after the coffee has kicked in, schedule brainstorming or decision-making meetings then. Schedule the least interactive meetings at a "down"time, Stack advised.

Consider strategic moves, like avoiding all meetings on Friday (Coors Brewing does this) or scheduling a regular meeting at 3 p.m. on Fridays. If the employees can leave after a Friday-afternoon meeting is done, they will stay focused and work efficiently.

• Use Microsoft Outlook tools.

The AutoPick Next feature will show when all e-mail invitees are next available, based on their own Outlook calendar appointments. If a meeting will be in a busy room, give the room an e-mail ID and add it to the AutoPick.

The Voting feature tracks responses from colleagues and compiles them into a list with the answer and answer time.

• Write a document with ground rules.

Make sure there are decision makers at the meeting. Instead of hearing, "We'll see if we can do that,"make sure somebody can say "We'll accomplish that."Also, decide how long to wait for a vital decision maker to show up before cancelling the meeting.

Assign roles and responsibilities, too. Make somebody a timekeeper and enforce limits on certain topics. Make somebody a scribe who does not take long-winded notes, but instead writes down the decisions made.

Be consistent about breaks, and let attendees know if food will be provided or not.

Stack had funny, albeit cheesy, ways to encourage humor. She once saw a meeting facilitator use a toy elk to discourage side conversations: The woman would simply give the disruptors the animal. Another gave everybody blue index cards, and each would subtly wave the card if he or she felt the conversation was off topic.

She encouraged meeting leaders to "be brave"and ask for feedback about how well they conduct meetings.

The conference for SHRM (pronounced "sherm") drew in 20,000 - the most the association has ever seen. Members of the local chapter volunteered to coordinate the meeting, including volunteer co-chairwomen Sandra Leichty of Custom Benefit Consultants and Jennifer Martinez of Konami Gaming.

The meeting was a platform for several new HR studies, which provided on the following results:

• Companies that set up separate Web sites with a .jobs extension expect lower recruiting costs in the next year. This new online strategy lets job candidates navigate directly to a jobs site, such as www.shrm.jobs for the society's openings.

• The top five contributors to job satisfaction in 2007 were pay, benefits, job security, flexibility to balance work/life issues and communication between employees and senior management.

The least important factors included contribution of work to the organization's business goals, variety of work and networking. Other issues found to be not strongly connected to job satisfaction were career-advancement opportunities and job-specific training.

• Employee benefits that decreased from 2006 to 2007 included automobile allowance/expenses, individual investment and retirement advice, traditional pensions, benefits and discounts on company services. The only benefit that increased over the last year was allowance for cellular phones or other handheld mobile devices.