What is the value of a meeting?

Do you feel like you are spending more time in virtual meetings than you would like? Are these meetings leaving you little time to get any work done? Since we moved en masse to remote work, there have been seismic shifts in how we work. Not only are most of us working from home, but so are our partners. If you have children, then they are probably home too. If your children are younger and you live some place with little access to childcare, then you are perhaps juggling with constant interruptions to your work too. You may be exhausted by the end of a work day with no end in sight of when this will all go back to “normal”. A recent paper in Nature Human Behavior found that among researchers, there has been a dramatic reduction in time spent on research especially among female researchers who are also juggling childcare responsibilities. This may well be true across many other jobs and occupations as well. Is there a way that leaders can help alleviate some of the burden that employees are facing today?

One of the most prevalent and frequent activity in most modern organisations is the meeting. Research shows that meeting overload can lead to reduced well-being. Although this was true even before the migration to remote work that we have recently seen, given the ease with which one can set up a meeting and the belief that meetings may give leaders a sense of control and create an illusion of progress of work tasks, it may be tempting for leaders to overload employees with virtual meeting requests. Given the paucity of excuses available to wriggle out of meetings – no travel, no client site visits, it may be difficult for an employee to reject meeting requests without giving an impression that they are busy catching up with the latest Netflix series.

This makes it particularly important for leaders to be mindful of their need to monitor and keep track of progress on tasks through virtual meetings. Leaders need to adopt use of alternative technologies such as Slack where short messages may replace the long form interactions that virtual meetings demand.

I came across a tool, called expensivemeeting.com, that seems to provide a clever way to quantify and minimise leaders’ obsession with meetings. All it requires you to input is the average wage of those attending a meeting for the duration of a meeting. Very quickly, you notice how expensive meetings really are from a cost standpoint.

The pandemic has forced many changes to the way we work and live. Given the lack of opportunities to socialise that workplaces often provide, virtual meetings do offer an avenue for some of employees’ social needs to be met. Yet, overdoing it may be too costly and lead to fatigue with little productivity gains. My recommendations for leaders are as follows:

• Limit meetings to shorter durations, preferably less than 30 minutes
• Monitor the cost of meetings to ensure that you are not killing productive time simply because you need constant updates on task progress
• Adopt other modalities such as Slack so that updates can happen with shorter engagement

The pandemic has led us to rethink about many aspects of our work and our lives. We have an opportunity to re-create work environments where people can thrive and be productive whether they are working in the office or remotely. Hopefully, this reset provides us an opportunity to rethink the use and abuse of meetings.