Meetings Multiply Despite Our Complaints

This whole week I’ve been talking about the proliferation of meetings, and the ways that they can undermine our ability to do deep work. Moreover, for many of the people in these meetings, they are not engaging and feel like a waste of time.

Yet, despite the fact that everybody agrees with most of that, meetings in remote teams are up to 60% since 2021. Virtual organizations are having more meetings than ever, although, many more of them are one-on-one than they used to be. Still, most meetings, have multiple people in them.

Why Meetings?

One question that remains unanswered, is why we have so many meetings, and more specifically, why virtual organizations have so many meetings. Ostensibly, when our organizations decided to operate remotely, there was an implicit belief that much of our work does not require being with other people.

But, I suspect that there may be underlying psychological reasons why we default to meetings. I am not a psychologist, and I have not done any experimental research on this. But, the sheer volume of meetings would suggest that something other than producing results is driving us. Especially in virtual organizations.

I was talking to a head of data at one of my client companies yesterday. He is incredibly productive, and also has an uncanny sensitivity to organizational culture and the well-being of his peers. He said that for the first time his years of working remotely he is feeling lonely. Not personally lonely, but organizationally lonely. He feels isolated and separate both from his team and the organization.

I don’t think he’s unique. It makes me wonder whether some of the compulsion to hold meetings for every possible reason isn’t driven by a very human social drive to feel connected.

But again, that is purely speculative.

Leader’s Meeting Heuristics

As a leader, you are still left with the problem of needing more time to work. And that working time is definitely being cannibalized by an ever increasing number of meetings. If you have that in the back of your mind, and you want to reduce the overall number of meetings that you and your team have, then you need some heuristics for how to think about when and why to schedule a meeting.

Moreover, you probably need some tools for how to conduct a good meeting when you do have one.

Based on the available research, and on my own experience, there are some agreed-upon principles about meetings.

Objective: We don’t schedule meetings without some justification. Something prompts it. There’s a problem, a decision that needs to be made, a project that you’re tracking or a team that needs to connect together. Anyone of those could justify a meeting. But, any meeting justified by one of those might also be fulfilled in another way. And that may be the question worth asking.

So, when there is an issue and someone suggests a meeting, consider using these questions to decide whether or not that’s the right solution:

What exactly would a solution look like? Is it a decision? Is it a consensus? Is it an announcement? Is it a problem that requires a solution? Is it something else?

Who needs to be involved in order for us to generate that solution? The goal is to define the exact universe of participants to reach the fully acceptable solution. This isn’t a social decision, it’s about influence, information, expertise, data and authority. In other words, you don’t want to have a committee that is thinking about and making recommendations (the well-known death spiral of governmental decision-making). You want to convene the people who can both craft recommendations and ultimately make a decision if at all possible.

What information or preparation will those people require to craft a solution? Before even considering a meeting, determine what the prerequisites are for the solution. If there is information to collect, an analysis, survey or something else, then performing those tasks is next —not a solution or discussion.

What would be the best way for the those people to craft that solution? Here, a meeting may be the solution. But it may also simply be to create a project in Asana, assign tasks, track the tasks, and have all of the communication asynchronously.

If you ask all of those questions before deciding to schedule a meeting, some reasonable percentage of the time a meeting will not be the solution. It will be something else.

For example, I am in the process of designing an employee onboarding process for a client company.

When I first raised the issue, one of the leadership team members recommended a meeting of all of the leaders to discuss it. But after applying the questions above, it was perfectly clear that there was nothing to discuss yet. And, that no matter how such a meeting went, I would still be left with roughly the same activities to perform.

I will need to meet with people. But only once I have done all of the preparation work to be able to use their time effectively and efficiently.

If you Are Meeting

Clearly, there are times when a meeting is exactly the thing you need. And those times are typically when you need to solve a specific problem, collaborate on developing a strategy, make a collective decision, brainstorm or simply touch base with a remote team.

To make sure that those meetings are useful, and not a waste of time, there are some best practices. I did not make this up, they are supported by a ton of research.

1. Objective: Every meeting should have a clear objective. If it is some kind of an organizational meeting, it may need an agenda. But at the very least, the meeting needs a specific objective — a way to know when the meeting has accomplished its goal.
2. Participants: Only those who are necessary for the meeting's purpose should attend. If someone's presence isn't necessary, they shouldn't be in the meeting. If people are included as optional attendees, they should be offered an after-meeting summary, so that they can easily decline the meeting without fear of missing something.
3. Time: Meetings should be as short as possible unless they are intended as a working session in which the group will be creating something complex together. Often times, those meetings are best in open-ended durations—like all afternoon. But in that case, it is less of a meeting and more of a workshop.
4. Preparation: It should be absolutely clear, and explicitly stated how people are to prepare for the meeting. I know that lots of people admire Jeff Bezos’ process of designating the first 30 minutes for everybody to read a detailed memo setting the context for the meeting. If you admire that, great, do that.

My own preference is to have people do the preparation in advance of the meeting. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t clearly articulate the purpose of the meeting at its beginning and revisit the context in order to set the tone. But, there are other kinds of preparation that may be judicious to make the meeting productive. Detail what is to be done in advance —even assign it if the culture requires (or permits) that. Whether research, analysis, data collection, or other types of preliminary work, it should be done ahead of time and provided to the participants before the meeting.

Are You a Professional Meeting Attender?

The odds are that your job description is not to “have meetings”. If you need to generate thoughtful work, it probably?takes time?to do it.?Is fragmented and delimited blocks of time between meetings the best way for you to create that value? Probably not. More likely, you need prolonged thought and focus, with longer durations of time and fewer dead stops.

You need to reduce your meetings and corral your extended blocks of time. So commit yourself to being thoughtful about when to have meetings, and how to conduct them.

Although I am absolutely on a crusade to reduce the number of meetings, I do not want to obliterate them. I just want them to be fewer and valuable rather than prolific and tedious.

Is your organization ready to seriously interrogate what it takes for granted in order to explode its results? That is part of what Beyond Better consulting provides. Schedule a call with me to discuss your organizations strategy, and the culture that is demanded by that strategy.