5 Signs Leaders Are Contributing to Meeting Overload

Since the great remote work experiment began, professionals have seen a 29% increase in time spent in team meetings and 24% increase in time spent in one on one meetings.

In a survey conducted by Korn Ferry, 67% of respondents said that spending too much time in meetings had a negative impact on their work.

In short: employees are spending too much time in meetings, and that's bad for employees, leaders, and business outcomes.

A shift to more async practices can help reduce the need for so many synchronous meetings–to maximize the positive impact of this shift, commitment is needed at the leadership level. This commitment requires honest self-reflection of current practices and mindset.

Here are five signs that leaders are contributing to meeting overload.

1. Defaulting to synchronous meetings for all purposes?

Need to get an update??Brainstorm ideas? Make a decision? Do you plan a meeting for every single one of these purposes (and more)?

If so, you're contributing to meeting overload.

Not every work activity needs to be a meeting. Many of the tasks teams use meetings to accomplish can be done asynchronously—especially tasks involving informing, collaborating, and problem solving.

The Placeless Taxonomy, pictured below, categorizes purposes in order of least to most difficult to achieve asynchronously. Save your synchronous meeting time for the activities on the top of the pyramid, and convert activities on the lower end to asynchronous or blended processes.

2. Inviting more people than necessary to seem inclusive

Especially in remote and hybrid settings, leaders often opt to invite as many people as possible to a meeting to avoid leaving anyone out. Virtual meeting platforms that have seemingly unlimited capacity make this practice all too easy.

However, unless everyone that attends the meeting is given the same opportunities to actively participate, this is a false sense of inclusion. For instance, if you're inviting people just to "listen in" on a decision making process, they're not really being included in accomplishing the purpose of the meeting. They're given a different status than those who are actively participating.

To quote Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering, "Purpose is your bouncer." Use your meeting's purpose to determine who should attend and who should not—and remember, more is not merrier when it comes to meetings.

3. Declining meetings is frowned upon

Team members should be able to take ownership of their time, such as declining an invitation to a meeting that doesn't require their active participation. To do that, they need sufficient information to accurately assess whether they need to be present in a meeting or not. If a direct report declines a meeting, and you believe they should be there, then your first reaction should be to reevaluate the information that employee has about the meeting.?

Individual contributors need permission to optimize their schedules—if you don’t already have an async-first culture, this permission needs to be made explicit.?Define the conditions under which a team member can decline a meeting (e.g. if there is no agenda) and communicate those conditions to your team. If a team member is in a meeting and you realize that their active participation is not needed, tell them they can leave, and remind them they can do the same in future meetings.

4. Meetings have no rules

Meeting norms, guidelines, rules—whatever you want to call your team's expectations for how meetings should be run, you need them. If you don't have concrete, consistent norms, you risk making every meeting a complete waste of time. And all too often if things don't get done in one meeting, the solution tends to be... another meeting.

An alternative version of this sign is when there are different rules for leaders than there are for everyone else—as in, most people are expected to show up on time, take notes, and follow up on action items, but leaders can be exempt.

Not only do you need meeting norms, but as a leader, it's your responsibility to model those norms for your team.

5. Attending meetings is the primary way people stay in the loop

If meeting attendance is the primary way people stay informed about what's happening in the organization, team members will opt-in to more meetings than they need because they are afraid of missing out.

Establishing and enforcing meeting norms that include concise and complete documentation of context and decisions can help alleviate the pressure team members feel to attend every meeting possible so they know what's going on.

What leaders can do to reduce meeting overload

If any of these five signs are present in your team, consider the tips included above, and explore the benefits of improving asynchronous communication practices as well as how you can adopt more async practices.

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