It's time to stop the meetings madness

Before you read on, don't forget to register for our Meetings Productivity webinar this Wednesday.

We've all been there - sat in a meeting thinking, "this could've been an email or a Slack ping."

Despite the seismic shift to the digital workplace, where you don't have to be in the same room or even time zone as your colleagues, meetings remain a staple of most people's working days.

This isn’t a huge surprise. Meetings have long been the lifeblood of companies for decades and it’s how people traditionally collaborate and share information. And when configured correctly, an effective meetings culture can help companies connect and motivate their teams.?

But too often employees are stuck in a seemingly never-ending cycle of quick check-ins, catch-ups and stand-ups that are just guises for meetings that include too many people and don’t accomplish as much as anyone had hoped.?

This trend has only been exacerbated with the continued presence of remote and hybrid teams, where the need to coordinate often leads to an explosion in meetings and over-collaboration.??

Shockingly, Microsoft says that this has seen a 252% rise in the number of virtual meetings since the beginning of the pandemic.

As a result, it is reported by Booqed that employees are in an average of over 8 meetings per week across all employee types and company sizes and that each employee spends 31 hours in unproductive meetings every month—that's almost 4 full days.

Now, we can all joke about how painful this is—just take a look at all of the meeting memes. But that pain has real consequences for your teams and the productivity of your wider organisation.?

Meetings waste employees' time and cost companies millions of dollars every year.?

Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into individual time that is essential for getting work done.

And beyond the time in the meeting itself, every time an employee switches to a meeting, it is reported that they lose 23 minutes to ramping up and winding down, then getting back to their original task.?

As highlighted in the Microsoft Work Trend report, interrupted schedules also disrupt deep thinking and focus time. So to concentrate, people start work early, finish late, or use weekends for quiet time. This is what Microsoft call the rise of the ‘triple peak’ working day and is a perpetuating trend that can be a significant source of declining employee experiences and a key driver of burnout.

We know that meetings can sometimes be a huge waste of an individual’s or team’s time. But they can also be a waste of money too.?

Imagine a team with 10 people and the average salary is $70,000. This team meets for an hour, twice a week. The cost of those meetings equates to almost $100 every single week—and that’s just on salary costs. Add to this the cost of software licensing for the meeting plus the cost of time ramping up to, and winding down from, a meeting and your costs start to soar.

So how do you find the right balance for your unique workplace?

It’s time for change

When studying in-person meetings back in 2017, Harvard Business Review found that real improvement requires systemic change, not individual fixes. The same is true for your digital meetings.?

Simply asking individuals to schedule fewer meetings doesn’t work.

Often this is due to a lack of understanding as to which meetings to cut, how long to cut for and a reliance on a meeting-driven, synchronous culture that feels impossible to break free from.?

But since 2020, we've moved from seeing work as being in a fixed place to something we can do from anywhere at any time.

And it's not just down to the fact that we all have smartphones permanently glued to our palms or a laptop with us at all times—it's about how much more productive we are when we don't feel like we have to be in the same physical or virtual room as someone else to work together.

So where we work is more or less settled. The majority of ‘knowledge’ companies now have a hybrid working policy where employees split their time between remote and in-office work. Now, it's time to think beyond the physicality of where work happens and more about how the lack of a central space changes the way we work.

Rise of asynchronous work

Perhaps the biggest opportunity of the shift to hybrid working is the end of linear work—the end of the traditional 9-to-5 and a move to an asynchronous environment.

Asynchronous refers to the practice of working within a team that does not require all members to be working at the same time. When you work asynchronously, individuals can maximize their productivity without waiting for others to complete tasks.

The key is creating processes that allow employees to work autonomously and provide employees with the trust they need to do so.

It requires an understanding of what the working day currently looks like at your company and investment in the right digital workplace technologies to aid the move away from excessive meetings.?

But there is one major casualty for asynchronous to fully take hold: meetings.

It’s truly time to end this meeting madness.

The technologies we all use to make up our digital workplace allow us to be more dynamic and more flexible in the way that we share and interpret information, collaborate and connect.?

It’s far quicker and more transparent than the physical equivalent. But the big issue companies face is the limited visibility on how these tools are adopted and utilised, and the impact this has on meetings.?

If you don't know where you're starting from it's impossible to have ambitions for improvements.?

At Temporall, we help you answer a number of key questions to get you started:

• How many meetings do your teams have across the organisation, and how does that change by seniority,?
• How long are team meetings?
• Is there an area of the business which is in significantly longer meetings or a higher number of meetings than another??
• How do meetings relate to the number of Slack messages or emails being sent??
• Do we have the right technology to move away from a meetings-driven, synchronous communication culture?

With better insights into how work happens and the impact of your meetings, you can make better, faster and smarter decisions to drive change.

Join our webinar Wednesday 9th November to learn more. If you can't attend live, still ensure you register and we will send you a recording of the event.

Words by Rebecca Payton