The Oppressive Weight of a Meeting-Heavy Culture

According to Atlassian, US employees average 62 meetings per month, and half of those are unproductive. Anecdotally, I took at look at the last 4 weeks on my own calendar, and I count 68 meetings - and I even took one day off and my place of work was closed two days! In other words, it could have been an even higher number. So naturally I've been musing a lot on meetings. The image above represents a fairly typical week for me (aargh!).

The kind of numbers listed above illustrate a workplace dilemma that many of us face constantly: we are subsumed in a "meeting culture" that seems to devour our time and energy while at the same time stagnating our collective productivity and deflating our individual spirit. Ugh.

But wait, meetings are "work" aren't they? I suppose so, at least technically You're getting paid, and so is everyone else in the meeting. That cost can be calculated, of course. For example, if you've got 10 people in a meeting, and their pay averages $50 per hour, that's $500 spent. If it's a weekly meeting for one year (40 work weeks), that's $20k spent - now tell me, was the outcome of those meetings worth that amount? By the way, that same infographic from Atlassian mentioned above purports to measure a total salary cost of unnecessary meetings for one year in the US at $37 billion! Ouch.

Most of us do our daily work in some part of the knowledge economy - we no longer forage for nuts and berries, or till the soil, or assemble gadgets in busy factories. In fact, most of us no longer focus on much of anything physical in our daily work - we don't make stuff with our grubby little hands at all. Instead, we plant ourselves in chairs and use our minds and knowledge; we contribute ideas and strategies; we communicate and influence; we seek things like "customer engagement" or "experience design" or "marketing strategies"; we send lots of emails and try oh-so-hard not to log into our social media accounts - unless of course your daily work involves reaping and sowing on the fertile plots of social media platforms!

I do not believe that our businesses are inherently evil. I do not think that a meeting-heavy culture was concocted by an exclusive club of sadistic CEOs hell-bent on torturing employees. In fact, I'm going to assume the opposite: most of us work in places that sincerely try to succeed and really do want to employ smart and dedicated people, and to treat them well. That is, our organizations are well-intentioned, and we as staff strive for clear communication, transparency, and strong collaboration. If people are working together, well then we're on the right path, correct?

Perhaps. It's just that little part about working together: it leads to meetings, meetings and more meetings. We have to meet, how else can we know what's happening and coordinate our efforts? But, then again, most people agree that meetings suck!

Why can't we seem to stop having meetings?

Because we secretly adore them!

According to Ron Ashkenas, author of Why We Secretly Love Meetings, we find some reward in our meetings. Namely, meetings are social events where we get to interact with others, feel included, keep informed, and measure our importance (she who is invited to the most meetings is champion!). Thus meetings fulfill some of our less-rational and more-emotional or -interpersonal needs. Ashkenas writes, "... just complaining about too many meetings or poorly run meetings won’t do much good. Like moths to a flame, we’ll keep coming back, no matter what we say".

Yes, almost everyone agrees that meetings are often terrible and nonproductive. Why? Anna Johansson lays out her perspective in Why Meetings Are One of the Worst Business Rituals. Ever. Please read her article for more detail, but in essence she outlines the factors that make meetings horrible because they interrupt our workdays, often stray off-topic, include the wrong people, pull others away from their work, cost money and most-importantly are often spent talking about work instead of just doing work.

As I was reading her article, I was thinking of another factor that weighs heavily on my mind as I strive to lead a workplace that is less hierarchical: a meeting-heavy company culture may undermine each person's sense of autonomy and agency; that is, employees perceive that they are NOT empowered to make any decisions without some kind of meeting beforehand. That's precisely the opposite of what I aim to achieve with my team, so I need to be very intentional about the meetings that I call.

Psychology - my educational background - warns us of many potential paths to madness. One of the most-common ways to make people go crazy is to say one thing but do another. This happens so often with meetings. In his article The Madness of Meetings Dan Pontrefact weaves a tale about a particularly vital meeting involving "sensitive matters" that required the attendance of senior leaders who were very busy. The difficulty in scheduling this meeting, dealing with pre-meeting planning, and repeating the meeting all add up to frustration, wasted time, and perhaps most-importantly a deep suspicion that the meeting was never actually vital nor sensitive to begin with! In your organization, calling a meeting mandatory or top-priority had better actually mean something, or your staff will quickly see you as the child who cried wolf.

Maybe we could focus on simplicity a bit, and at least see some improvement?
How to Change a Bad Meeting Culture describes a number of familiar problems with meetings, and offers tips on how to correct them. My favorite from the list references Parkinson's Law of Triviality - wasting time on trivial details while the important decisions remain untouched. The author Kevin Kruse suggests opening a meeting with "quiet time" as practiced at times by Jeff Bezos of Amazon - giving people the time and space to develop ideas focused on what's important. Please read the article for the the longer list of problems and potential fixes.

Another important aspect of effective meetings is making sure that there are actions agreed upon and carried out. Read: Two Things To Do After Every Meeting

At the very least, we should all take the time and learn what is needed to get better at this meeting thing. Getting the basics down pat and using them consistently goes a long way toward success: How to Run an Effective Meeting

And we should not schedule any meetings that are not actually important and necessary. Don't meet just to meet, and don't meet just because a meeting is on your calendar! In How to Finally Kill the Useless, Recurring Meeting author Ryan Fuller writes, "We’ve all been part of a bloated weekly meeting. You know the one, with 20-plus attendees that’s been happening every week for years; where everyone attends because they’re supposed to, but no one gets much value out of it; where everyone multitasks or wishes they were somewhere else (or both) ... So how do you fix it?...The key is to engage all employees in a new way of thinking about time management and to encourage them to hold themselves and their colleagues accountable."

One final set of thoughts for today. What to do when you keep getting invited to time-wasting meetings? Author Dorie Clark tries to help in her post How to Get Out of a Meeting You Know Will Waste Your Time in which she advocates for each of us to be intentional about choosing meetings to attend. For example, she lists questions you might consider in deciding whether to attend a meeting:

• What is the exact topic?
• What is the timing and location?
• What is the duration?
• Who else will be in attendance?
• What decision needs to be made at the meeting? (This helps you easily determine whether the intended meeting is high-value.)
• Why, specifically, do you need me to be there? (This forces them to articulate a clear reason. If they say “To keep you updated,” then you can simply tell them to do this post facto by sharing the minutes with you.)

She urges us to push back on a meeting-heavy culture, to protect our valuable time, because "Meetings are the scourge of modern business life ... Many professionals attempt to cope in a passive-aggressive way, showing up late to meetings or fiddling with their gadgets instead of listening. But that may be the worst choice of all, because it perpetuates an office culture where it’s OK to tune out your colleagues and disrespect others’ time" - while sitting in yet another meeting!

Bottom line: we need meetings, but it's crucial that we make them purposeful, useful and - for goodness' sake - SHORT!