Meetings Be Damned!
Over the past three years, the idea of the workplace has been completely upended. Remote work has proven to be just as, if not more effective than, in-office work. And most of my clients now work either entirely remotely or in a hybrid environment. Remote working is a win for all involved. Employees love the flexibility to work from wherever they happen to be, along with the time that they’ve recovered from not making a daily commute. Employers are happy with the measurable results and the decreased expenses associated with maintaining office space.
However, one significant negative has arisen from the dominance of remote work, and that is the culture of endless meetings. I hear from clients who have so many meetings, recurring meetings, standing meetings, optional meetings, and required meetings that their calendars are booked all day, each day. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of meetings and are stressed at not having time to do actual work.
Questioning the usefulness of meetings is nothing new. In 2017, I wrote this post on LinkedIn, Death by Meeting, which was liked by nearly 300K people, and has more than 10K comments. It obviously hit a nerve! But this current culture of excessive meetings borders on absurd and, in some cases, is, in fact, absurd. Studies show that the average corporate worker is spending 50% more time in meetings now than they did pre-pandemic and that most of us spend an average of 22 hours per week—more than half of the standard 40-hour work week—in meetings. When someone has meetings for 9 hours straight, how productive can they be?
e-Commerce provider Shopify has said “ENOUGH.” On January 3, the company made an announcement to all employees that it would do away with all recurring meetings with more than two participants and that Wednesdays would be designated as meeting-free days. Further, Shopify would limit meetings with more than 50 people to a 6-hour window on Thursdays. The company estimates that this will free up approximately 80,000 hours annually. Company executives anticipate that this will not only improve productivity and results but also combat what has become known as Zoom fatigue. Most importantly, as Shopify’s COO stated, no one joined the company to sit in meetings. That’s a very succinct summary of the core problem: work has become little more than a series of meetings.
Although meetings aren’t going away, I hope to see more companies following suit and creating guidelines for having a reasonable number of meetings. If you are hosting a meeting, think before you click send. Do all the invitees really need to be there? Could some of them be optional? Could the information you wish to share with the people in the meeting be conveyed via email or instant messaging instead? If you are leading a meeting, be sure you have a set agenda for that meeting and a defined expectation of what you intend to get out of the meeting. Stop meeting just to meet. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.