All Meetings are Canceled Until Further Notice
Tim Richardson
The Power of the Pause/Exceptional Service keynotes, workshops, and panel discussion facilitator. Speaker, author, husband, father, outdoor enthusiast, and aspiring jazz pianist.
Music to your ears, right? That happened last week at? Shopify . They have decided what many of us already know – a lot of meetings are unnecessary and, unproductive.
Shopify is deleting almost 10,000 calendar events – a total of 76,500-plus hours. They are also:
- Making all Wednesdays meeting free.
- Prohibiting recurring meetings of more than three people.
- Limiting larger meetings to only Thursdays and capping their length.
- Encouraging employees to get out of large Slack groups.
According to Bloomberg, long meetings have come to be a bug of sorts in the hybrid workplace. In 2020 and 2021, the number of meetings per week doubled, a 微软 study indicated.
Productive meetings are great. But unproductive meetings are not. Meeting and Zoom fatigue are real problems in today’s workplace. Long, unnecessary meetings are morale drainers and cost organizations millions of dollars in wasted time. Fight the urge to meet just to meet.
Consider:
- Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself or ask the person planning the meeting, “Is there another way to accomplish what you want without meeting?”
- If you must meet, ALWAYS start and end on time.
- Consider starting all meetings at odd times – instead of starting at 2:00, start at 1:57. Starting at an odd time helps people pay attention and hopefully increases the probability that the meeting will actually start on time. Or you might try this, “I need an answer, resolution or suggestion on __________ and if you can give me one by Monday afternoon we can avoid having a meeting."
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- Practice the habit of having very short meetings. Nido R. Qubein , president of? High Point University , has what I call fast action conversations, and they are always at the other person’s office and he never sits down. Make your next "meeting" fast action and avoid the chairs!
- Only invite people critical to the meeting outcome.
- Briefly explain the process of what you need in the beginning. For example, “I need a few ideas to pass on to the board for their consideration on where to spend our surplus”.
- If you must meet, get creative. Consider meetings while walking, working out, or carpooling. Use your phone to record the conversation to capture the ideas from your “meeting”
- Use Yoodli, a new technology, that helps presentation effectiveness and helps those who talk a lot on Zoom meetings realize they are dominating the conversation.
- Be very clear of the meeting intentions and objections before you meet
- Use a “parking lot” board to capture ideas or questions not relevant to the meeting objectives.
- Consider having quick training sessions on meeting management tools, processes and structure once every six months or yearly.
- The reason we dislike meeting is they are run poorly. It is not the content in a lot of cases but the process. If a meeting is run well, we do not mind if they go longer than expected because they are productive and are not wasting our time. All meetings are not bad, all bad meetings are bad. Even so, less can be more.
Shopify CEO and co-founder Tobias Lütke told Bloomberg that "the best thing founders can do is subtraction."
"It's much easier to add things than to remove things. If you say yes to a thing, you actually say no to every other thing you could have done with that period of time."
While not all meetings are unnecessary, many can be.
We all have limited time. Use your meeting time wisely.
Eliminating Territorial Divides, Building Collaborative Teams | Leadership Retreat Keynote Speaker | Teamwork Consultant.
1 年Thank you for sharing Tim Richardson. Always great to read your posts. I think there are great points here while also some nuance to consider. There are many meetings that are unnecessary - 100% agree. At the same time, in some cases, the most important work of the team is done in meetings - decisions are made, debate is needed, alignment is created, trust is built. This is especially true of a leadership team. In that case, the answer wouldn't be to just eliminate meetings. It would be to eliminate *unnecessary* meetings and spend energy on making the truly important team meetings amazing. In my work, that is what I have seen be successful. This would include taking steps such as separating tactical meetings from strategic meetings (instead of stuffing too much into one meeting - nod to Patrick Lencioni). That one step makes weekly meetings short, tight, and highly productive. Great conversation!
President ICMAS
1 年Working in the scientific capital equipment market things ( orders) do not more quickly, they can take months or even years to come to conclusion (PO), so on a week to week basis not much happens. However many of the companies we represent ( we are contactors not employees) insist on these weekly meeting which are a total waist of time, considering all with access to Sales Force or other CRMs have the most up to date forecasting information which is in some cases is updated daily or at least weekly but upper management still insists in holding these meeting. Since we are a contractor we go along but wish we could find a nice way to say, we can meet and rehash the old weekly in a one to two hour meeting or we can use that time to find more prospects.
Motivational Business Keynote Speaker | Encouragement as a Biz Strategy | BradMontgomery.com
1 年Great post, Tim!
I highly commend Shopify for eliminating meetings from their calendars going forward. I love the suggestions on this article.
Professor at Maryville College
1 年Thanks for sharing this, Tim! Often in academia we seem to be frustrated with endless committee meetings that are often not as productive as they could be, but also struggle to make any changes. We have talked recently quite a bit about the challenge of always being good at adding things and struggling to remove things - including committees and their accompanying meetings. These ideas can help, and I'll be sharing them with colleagues.