As I close the window on my third company/team-wide meeting of the day, I feel like it is time to address the elephant in the corporate boardroom: Meeting overload.
Pre-COVID, this concept was laughable, or at the minimum, hard to fathom. How could someone effectively do a job when they are in back-to-back-to-back one-hour meetings?
Zoom and Teams and other virtual face-to-face meeting platforms have drastically changed that perception. Now, there’s a meeting for everything: Weekly or even daily sales check-ins; organizational town halls; the dreaded weekly lunch-and-learn; even going-away and retirement parties; heck, many annual holiday get-togethers have gone full-virtual.
Take a look at your employees’ Outlook or Teams calendars. If there are more than three mandatory, organization-wide meetings a day, it might mean some reevaluation is in order. Excessive meetings leave people frazzled and crabby, with much less time to complete their daily work. Unproductive becomes the next step, potential failure the next, followed by burnout, and then all of a sudden, you are looking for a new employee.
“The biggest mistake leaders can make when establishing a meeting culture is failing to create a meeting schedule,” writes Raquel Gomes, CEO of Stafi, a remote staffing company for law firms. “Without a clear meeting schedule, employees have to frequently switch from meetings to actual work, which can wreak havoc on efficiency.”
She continues: “Start by questioning if a meeting is necessary at all. Could the issue be resolved with an email or a quick message? For essential meetings, set a clear agenda and keep them short. Meetings should be a space for collaboration, not a time-consuming obligation that interrupts the flow of productive work.”
Take a moment to evaluate your standing daily, weekly, and monthly meetings. While team members who work closely together may require them, in my opinion, there are very few organization-wide meetings that require everyone in the company to attend.
Instead of having a mandatory Wednesday afternoon “lunch-and-learn,” figure out the topic and invite only those it directly applies to. For example, there’s really no need for everyone in the company to attend a 45-minute meeting about a mundane procedure that the IT department needs to communicate. Can that not be put into an email?
If we cannot escape the incessant meetings, your business will suffer. Maybe we should take a page out of Shopify’s book. Back in 2023, the company instituted a “no-meetings Wednesday” policy and mandated a pullback on all meetings in general. By deleting meetings, COO Kaz Nejatian said in an interview that the hours gained back by his approximately 10,000 employees were equivalent to adding 150 new employees.
Your company may not be as large as Shopify’s, but as integrator after integrator cites hiring and retaining employees as a top concern, think about the productivity that can be gained by removing just a handful of unnecessary meetings in a week or a month. Are those hours equal to the output of five employees? 10? 100?
Take action, and whatever you do, don’t call a company-wide meeting to discuss it!
