Stop the meeting madness
This post is a summary of my in-depth podcast episode, Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Meetings - and how to fix them.
Annie Dean from Atlassian posted on LinkedIn that meetings are ineffective 72% of the time. When her company surveyed 5000 knowledge workers, guess what most people said was the reason they can’t get any work done (spoiler alert, it was meetings).
They identified five key reasons meetings are making it harder for teams to reach their goals:
The same voices dominate the conversations from meeting to meeting, alienating others who aren’t sure how to contribute
There are far too often no decisions and also no clear next steps resulting from these meetings
The same things get repeated over and over in these meetings, leading to attendees multitasking, like sending funny Teams messages
We waste meetings on things that could have been communicated in emails or other ways
And most meetings lack agendas or focus
Another key finding is that meetings rule the calendar, so everything else comes last, including “real work.” 78% of people they surveyed have so many meetings, it’s hard to get work done, and as a result 51% of them have to work overtime a few days a week because of meetings getting in the way.
But the finding that really blew me away? The one thing meetings are really good at is breeding more meetings. 77% of employees said that instead of resolutions and clear next steps, meetings often end in a decision to schedule another meeting. No wonder we can’t get any actual work done!
As someone who was regularly in 10 meetings a day in my last job, I think there’s more to this, though. I think the “consensus culture” that leads to an over-reliance on meetings - and the fear of mistakes and fiefdoms - is the real root of the problem.
Senior leadership needs to stop passing insecurities, fears, and turf wars down to their teams. Intentionally or not, they are instilling the belief that meetings are the only way to safely get things done. Instead, corporations need to promote leaders who aren’t afraid of failures, know how to learn from them, and won’t shame their teams for taking action.
I know this vision is a ways off, so for now there are ways to tactically make meetings better, including insisting on agendas. I go into that and more in my podcast episode Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Meetings - and how to fix them:
