Do your weekly meetings feel like a waste of time? More importantly, does your company have that kind of time to waste?

"In these tough economic times, every second of the work day is valuable," says Kimberly Douglas, author of the recently published book "The Firefly Effect: Build Teams That Capture Creativity and Catapult Results."

Boring, unproductive meetings are commonplace at many companies that "simply go through the motions," she said.

"If a new initiative is being implemented or new product ideas are needed, the feeling from management is often, 'Well, let's have a meeting. At least it will seem like we are doing something,"' she said. "Unfortunately, not enough thought goes into how to conduct those meetings."

Douglas offers these common meeting pitfalls and how they can be avoided or fixed:

• What's the point? It's important to run through a pre-meeting checklist before putting it on everyone's schedule, making sure the meeting is even necessary. Could the information you want to provide be just as easily presented in an e-mail? What do you want to accomplish with the meeting? Will reaching that goal really require a group decision?

• Where's the agenda? Having a plan in hand can ensure the quality of the meeting and make clear what needs to be done in advance. List three to six items, accompanied by how long they will take to discuss and who the discussion leaders will be.

• Conference room overcrowding. Keep the number of required attendees as small as possible, and if critical members can't attend, consider postponing the meeting until they can. Having a meeting without them can cause just as many delays and productivity problems as postponing the meeting a couple of days.

• The meeting will seemingly go on forever. Eyes may start wandering to watches, BlackBerrys and wall clocks as those attending wonder when they'll be able to get back to their long to-do lists. But if they know exactly when a meeting will be over, they won't spend their time internally speculating about when they can leave.

• The meeting becomes a free-for-all. Set conversational ground rules right away, like requiring everyone to participate or "speak in headlines" to avoid rambling.

• No decisions, commitments or next steps are identified. There is no simpler way to record what went on than by writing on a flip chart the who, what and by when.

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US employees expect to spend nearly two full days shopping online on computers at work this holiday season, according to research released last week.

One in 10 workers plans to spend more than 30 hours shopping online while at work, according to a survey conducted for ISACA, a nonprofit association of information technology professionals.

Convenience was the reason a third of the workers surveyed said they shop online, while a quarter of them cited boredom, it found.

Many US employees are working longer hours at companies that have cut staffs in the recession and have less time for personal tasks such as holiday shopping, said John Pironti, a member of ISACA and chief information risk strategist for Archer Technologies.

"Because we are asking so much more of employees ... we're finding they're blurring that line between professional and work life on a regular basis," he said.

"What you often hear from people is, 'I need to do this at work. You have to let me do this at work,'" he said.

On average, workers plan to spend 14.4 hours shopping online from work this holiday season, the survey said.

Also, roughly half the workers surveyed said they bank online at work, three in five click on e-mail links that redirect them to shopping sites and one in six click on links from social network sites.

More than one in 10 Americans who use a mobile device such as a BlackBerry or iPhone plan to use it for holiday shopping as well, the survey found.

The survey was based on online polling in September 2009 of 1,210 US consumers and 1,513 IT professionals. It was conducted by M/A/R/C Research and had a margin of error of 3.9 percentage points.

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Perceived poor managerial leadership increases not only the amount of sick leave taken at a workplace, but also the risk of sickness amongst employees later on in life. The longer a person has had a "poorer" manager, the higher his or her risk of for example suffering a heart attack within a ten-year period, according to a new thesis from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet.

The recently submitted thesis is based on data from almost 20,000 employees in Sweden, Finland, Germany, Poland and Italy, working in a range of fields, such as the forest or hotel industries. Some of the studies also included a representative selection of Sweden's entire working population and industries in the Stockholm region. The researchers compared levels of self-rated stress, health, sick leave and emotional exhaustion with how subjects perceived their managers' leadership in terms of certain positive and negative criteria, such as inspirational, supportive and good at delegating or authoritarian, dishonest and distant.

The researchers also looked at the effects of managerial leadership in relation to whether employees change jobs, quit due to poor health, or become unemployed. One of the studies examined the correlation between how employees rate their managers' leadership and the risk of their developing serious cardiovascular disease later in life. They discovered that male residents of the Stockholm area ran a 25 per cent greater risk of suffering myocardial infarction during the ten-year follow-up period if they had expressed displeasure with their managers at the start of the study. Moreover, the level of risk increased more sharply with time of employment for subjects that reported "poorer" leadership.

Another result presented in the thesis is that Swedish men and women who rated their managers as inspirational, positive and enthusiastic also reported less short-term sick leave. This correlation was independent of their self-rated general health.

"In several of the studies, we controlled for a number of conceivable competing causes of the negative health results, but failed to find anything," says Anna Nyberg, postgraduate at the Department of Public Health Sciences. "The bottom line is that our results show that there's a relationship between how employees find their managers and how they feel, physically and mentally, and not just while at work but also later in life."