Interested in more careers-related content? Check out our new weekly Work Life newsletter. Sent every Monday afternoon.
Which of these statements are true:
- Meeting are vital
- Meetings are a pain
- Meetings are a necessary burden
To some extent, probably all of them. But so is this one: We could benefit from reducing the time tied up in meetings in our team or organization.
If meetings are vital, they should have vitality. They require thought, rather than ritual. Rebecca Hinds, a consultant on collaboration who has worked with organizations around the world, says each one has its own special brand of dysfunction but the root cause is almost always the same: Their meetings weren’t intentionally designed. They just happened – and then kept happening.
“Instead of treating meetings as the high-stakes, high-cost product they are, companies view them as an unavoidable workplace tax – something to endure rather than design,” she writes in Your Best Meeting Ever.
That meeting cost grows inexorably in what she calls “the quiet accumulation of outdated, unnecessary and utterly pointless meetings that clog calendars.” Improving the situation involves some combination of cutting the number of meetings, cutting the amount of time in each, paring down the number of people who attend and improving the meeting dynamics.
One tactic some companies have adopted is a complete meeting cleanse. For a couple of days or a week, they ban meetings. Then they build back, in some ways the equivalent of zero-based budgeting, where everything has to be justified anew. “Even a 48-hour pause gives people enough breathing room to rethink what’s worth keeping,” she says.
Some organizations surprise employees with this initiative, as Dropbox did a decade ago with its “Armeetingeddon.” She prefers you announce your own Meeting Doomsday in advance, as part of your planning. If a full purge feels too extreme, she suggests starting small by eliminating all meetings with five or fewer attendees, which are easier to kill without a backlash.
The key, of course, is not the purge but how you sensibly build a new arrangement afterward. That means, she suggests, equipping employees to defend their time from meetings. “Employees need tools, scripts and a culture that makes pushing back on bad meetings the norm, not an act of defiance,” she says.
Speed bumps and gatekeepers can help.
Speed bumps are gentle nudges that encourage people to pause before adding another meeting to the calendar. She points to Shopify, which when it introduced No-Meeting Wednesdays knew the policy wasn’t sufficient. So it built a Slack bot that automatically nudged anyone attempting to book a meeting on the forbidden day in their calendar to reconsider.
If you have decided a big problem in your company is that meetings have too many people, you can have a calendar pop-up announcing, “Whoa! This meeting has more than eight people.” Or when a recurring meeting is inserted in the calendar – recurring until eternity, as often is the unspoken premise – an advisory can pop up suggesting it be scheduled for 90 days and re-evaluated then. “Speed bumps don’t block meetings outright. They make people pause,” she says.
Gatekeeping is tougher: If you want a meeting you must prove it should be held to some official, perhaps even the CEO. If the meeting isn’t worth the effort to seek such permission, it probably isn’t worth holding.
Evaluating the value of a meeting as you weigh what to build back can be important. She suggests asking attendees to fill out a survey about return on time invested: Zero for complete waste of time; one for a significant waste of time; two for break even (“time I invested matched the progress the meeting helped me make in moving my work forward”); three for moderate return on time; four for good return on time; and five for excellent return on time. You can also ask: What would it take for you to improve your rating by one point?
She also urges you to become a meeting minimalist, taking aim at four dimensions of your sessions:
- Agenda: A long agenda can often be a sign of clutter. Each item on an agenda should have a clear job to do that requires a meeting. She is a believer in “the rule of halves”: Try cutting your agenda items in half, giving priority to the items left standing. Routine updates and minor decisions get handled in other ways.
- Duration: Most meetings, she notes, drag on longer than necessary as everyone essentially collaborates to fill the time allotted. Instead, meetings should last only as long as necessary to accomplish their goals. Can you cut the time in half? That may seem uncomfortable but she counters that it may increase urgency in the meeting so people arrive on time and get right to the point. If cutting in half is too extreme she recommends as an alternative the 50/25 rule: Hour-long meetings are capped at 50 minutes and half-hour ones trimmed to 25 minutes.
- Attendees: Often many people in meetings aren’t needed and you would be wise to cut the number down – in half, perhaps – and widely circulate minutes afterward. “You’re not exiling anyone for life,” she stresses. “If you realize later that someone essential is missing, you can always loop them in.”
- Frequency: Sometimes recurring meetings are held too frequently. Again, can the frequency be cut in half – weekly meetings, for example, becoming every two weeks? Also be wary of spin-off meetings, when you have to meet again because the original meeting didn’t deliver or raised more questions than answers.
Work revolves around meetings these days but, at the same time, meetings can block work from being done, as exemplified by people routinely coming in early to attack their priorities because of relentless meetings. These ideas can help you find a better balance.
Cannonballs (from Rebecca Hinds’s Your Best Meeting Ever)
- Henley Business School professor Benjamin Laker found that when organizations implemented one no-meeting day a week, productivity improved by 35 per cent and with two such days a week the productivity improvement was 71 per cent.
- Zapier chief executive officer Wade Foster switched daily stand-up operational meetings to one weekly session, updates written in advance and read by all in the first 10 minutes of the gathering. Questions and feedback followed, participants sharing by order of coming birthdays to add some variety and team spirit.
- Don’t make keeping video on for online meetings a loyalty test, Ms. Hinds advises. If the meeting is emotionally low stakes, where nobody has to read facial expressions, let everyone have video off. But ones that involve mentoring, team building, delivering tough feedback, resolving conflict or handling hot potato issues should require all video to be on.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.