A survey of seventy-six companies that reduced their meeting load over the course of fourteen months found employees’ experience at work increased across many vectors of their work life, ranging from productivity to stress to engagement and job satisfaction.
During the pandemic, the number of meetings increased dramatically, some estimates put the increase at over 200 percent. The result was less time for work. This may have been necessary during the transition to Work From Home (WFH) as increased coordination and communication was needed during this tectonic shift. More meetings meant less time for work, and all the changes that COVID/WFH brought meant increased workloads. Wait a minute, more meetings, less time to do the work and more work to do? No wonder so much burnout and stress occurred, resulting in the great talent migration of 2020 and beyond—where across all sectors we saw talent turnover of around 40 percent.
Just as there are great reasons to meet, in person/face-to-face, there are more great reasons not to meet in person. This is not to discount the value of face-to-face communication by any means, rather, to honor the precious time and energy that face-to-face meetings require.
Don't meet to just share information! Information sharing tends to be a one-way process, and one-way conversations are not engaging. Not only that, but information sharing is often not an urgent need and can be accomplished asynchronously. Also, if you allow your people to choose when they download the information you want to share, you are increasing the likelihood they will truly read or listen to it, and retain the information you are sharing.
Don't meet to just get feedback! Want feedback on a presentation, document, or idea? When you ask for it face-to-face you are ensuring the quality of feedback you receive is incomplete and/or inaccurate. Gathering feedback in group settings invites participants into a space where their reptilian brain is the best you will find and groupthink most likely to flourish. If honest, clear, concise feedback is what you seek, send out the document, idea, or presentation to your people and provide clear concise directions on the feedback you want, and when you need it. However you shape the feedback mechanism (e.g. survey, ballot box, email, sticky notes), it is important that it can be delivered anonymously and transparently.
Don't meet to report out: Give a man a stage and he’ll drone for days, give him a pen and precise prose he’ll provide. Report outs have a utility, the problem is they are too often delivered in forums that obscure the intended insights and takeaways. Report outs can be better drafted, delivered, and received if done in asynchronous formats (with time bound expectations, of course). Report outs delivered digitally, left on the board, written on the wall, hosted in the cloud, published on YouTube, allow the people who are interested in the information to engage with it, deeply, and follow-up accordingly.
We need meetings for many reasons, and we don’t need all the meetings we’ve become so accustomed to hosting and holding. As a leader, talk to your team about which meetings can go and which need to stay. To help cull excess meetings, explore asynchronous collaboration processes and implement systems (e.g. Basecamp, Slack, Notion, Mural, Jamboard) where colleagues can share, update, collaborate, and report their findings/progress on their own schedules.
When organizations have high levels of transparency around goals, roles, processes, and relationships, the need for meetings is dramatically reduced because employees know what needs to be accomplished, why, how, and by whom.
In this section, we’ve explored a handful of ways to cut the number of meetings held. In the coming chapters, we explore how to make necessary meetings more engaging, impactful, and efficient. I challenge you to cut your time in meetings by 10 percent next month. This can be done with the aforementioned ti[s, or by implementing the efficient and impactful meeting process improvements in the subsequent chapters.
