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.

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 hav...

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 av...

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...

• 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,...