"It’s become too easy to take someone’s schedule away from them. People don’t think – they just click ‘yes’ to the invite"

Remote working has only exacerbated the problem of excess meetings, with casual deskside chats replaced by default half-hour Zoom calls. Analysis of employees' meeting invitations at 21,500 global companies by Harvard Business School revealed that although meetings were on average 12 minutes shorter versus pre-pandemic, people were attending 13% more of them, with the number of invitees rising by 14%.
More meetings, for more employees, mean more fragmented workdays – which impacts on productivity. Zoom fatigue creeps in, the risk of burnout spikes.

Excess meetings

Some companies have banned meetings, either permanently or for specific days each week.
Many tech-related start-ups, which often employ remote workers in different time zones prioritize efficient asynchronous communication rather than live calls.

Banning meetings

Humans are inherently social beings; our instinct to meet in order to strategize and share ideas predates modern civilization, let alone office culture.As knowledge work boomed in the mid-20th Century, businesses gradually moved away from command-and-control style leadership towards collaboration. Meetings became the best process to allow the coming together of ideas, inspiring innovation.Once video-conferencing technology became more sophisticated, meetings were no longer constrained by room size or office hours.

How meetings bloomed

Meetings can enable teams to brainstorm, align thinking and take decisive action, but without clear goals, they lose focus. They often bloat – what should be a quick one-on-one conversation becomes an hour-long call requiring entire teams. Bad meetings have knock-on effects that spill into the workday, as well as depriving workers of their time: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191111-blame-your-worthless-workdays-on-meeting-recovery-syndrome">Meeting recovery syndrome</a>, where workers ruminate post-meeting, can dent productivity. Constant context switching comes at a cost: it’s a form of multitasking, which our brains aren’t built to handle.

Good meetings, bad meetings

The no-meeting trend is fairly new: there's little concrete data to support whether it works and what gets lost. It’s why most of the discussion around it is anecdotal. However, it seems that without addressing pre-existing issues, an outright meeting ban simply moves the problem elsewhere.
The goal isn’t to eliminate meetings, it’s to eliminate the bad ones. You need to do the hard stuff – changing meetings and the ecosystem in which they sit so they’re more effective. Just banning them on an afternoon isn’t enough.”

Reform, don't remove

<ul>
<li>A common pitfall is that the unproductive Zoom calls are simply pushed to either side of the meeting-free day. Worse, time-stretched managers sometimes ignore company policy: they see a yawning gap in workers’ schedules on a no-meeting day and set up an hour-long call. Employees, meanwhile, presume the meeting must be important and feel obliged to attend.</li>
<li>There can be other unintended consequences, too. Meetings can be a surprisingly efficient way of exchanging information. Without alternatives in place, a quick question during a morning catch-up can be replaced by email ping-pong.</li>
</ul>

The struggle with implementing the "no-meeting" trend

A how-to guide those that lead or participate in meetings

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

productivity

Productivity

communication

Communication

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to Run an Effective Meeting

Some companies are weeding calls out of calendars to boost worker productivity. The idea is good in theory – but how about in practise?