Last year Shopify cancelled all meetings with more than two people. Their workforce of over 11,600 employees was fully remote. 12,000 calendar events were deleted at one stroke. Wednesdays became totally meeting-free. In research shared with Worklife, time spent in meetings dropped by 33% per employee. There was a 25% increase in completed projects. The business became ‘more operationally excellent and faster’.
Asana conducted a ‘meeting doomsday exercise’, asking employees to identify meetings that lacked value. Most 30-minute meetings were converted to 15 minutes, some weekly meetings shifted to every other week or month and others were deleted entirely. That meant each person was saving an average of 11 hours a month, about 3.5 workweeks per year.
Meanwhile other organisations meet and message as if it was still the middle of the Covid crisis. Since February 2020 people are in three times more Microsoft teams meetings and calls per week – a 192% increase. They now have more meetings in a day than they previously had in a whole week. Ironically, Microsoft’s own research has found that 68% of employees struggle to keep up with the pace of work. No guesses why.
The average worker spends about 37% of their time at work in meetings or coordinating them. Then there’s all the Teams messages on top. Have you done the maths? It’s impossible to think in 30-minute chunks between meetings. People end up triaging their inbox, adding to the 360 billion emails that are sent globally every single day.
The tech companies are fully aware of the dangers of the attention economy and the damage caused by their products. In the same way that tech executives don’t let their own children have smart phones, they control their employees’ reliance on communication technology.
Slack for example has a no-meeting Focus Friday policy and Maker Weeks, when teams cancel recurring internal meetings and focus on creating, coding, planning, writing. They found a tipping point that more than two hours of meetings a day lowered productivity. Owl Labs, who sell video conferencing devices, don’t have meetings on Fridays. Meetings during the rest of the week are monitored carefully and prioritised around teams’ work patterns.
Is it time for your Meeting Doomsday exercise?
No one has a company mission to sit in meetings all day. Yet at every Crazy Busy session I run, people say that meeting overload is the main inhibitor to productivity: aimless, repetitive internal meetings that suck up time and literally do their heads in. ‘How can I block out time for focused work when I haven’t got any space in my calendar?’ I get asked.
They tell me that lack of time for pre-meeting preparation means they often need another meeting to make a decision. They can’t organise that meeting for weeks, sometimes months, ahead because everyone’s calendar is busy. No wonder we have productivity problems. Just because meeting technology is available to us, we don’t have to be suckered into using it mindlessly. It’s too easy to invite everyone into a meeting. Unnecessary collaboration is a big factor in productivity drag – crazy busyness.
Take the plunge and make a cultural change. Go back to your purpose. Audit your meetings, cut back where you can, and train people to chair the rest effectively.