How to ditch the “meetings overload”
We’re now a year into covid and the WFH/Zoom era. Having worked mainly from home for the best part of a decade, I was fully expecting companies’ dependence on laborious meetings to wane this last year as people saw the advantages of the flexibility and space. Sadly, in lots of companies, it feels like the opposite has been true. Instead of being in back to back real meetings, it’s just constant Zoom, Slack and Teams connectivity.
I get asked a lot about managing meetings overload, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts with you.
Many people and organisations resort to “let’s set up a meeting” because in truth it’s easier than “let’s make a decision”. You want to avoid any meeting that is a substitute for someone else’s clearer thinking. But it’s also about balance: great meetings change the world, and sometimes a meeting together can be greater than the sum of the parts.
In my new book How to Fix Meetings, we talk about this as the ‘Yin and Yang of meetings’. Yin is about collaboration, and meetings offer a space to generously share attention with each other, to reflect, learn and listen. Meetings like this are vital to keep a team in tune with each other and help fix the little things that start to fail in isolation.
But we also need Yang: Creation. Action. Being heads-down doing the ‘real work’. If you’re desperately craving some Yang to “actually get some work done”, here are 5 solutions for you to mix and match, depending on the culture and situation:
1. The collective solution: If you’re in a position to influence the culture, set everyone the ‘take 5’ challenge: each person has to save 5 hours of the organisation’s time by deleting existing meetings (so a one hour meeting with 5 people = 5 hours — and you can save a surprising amount of time just by doing in 45 or 60 minutes what you’d previously done in 90). Ask everyone to bring their solutions to your next team meeting, and use this to facilitate a discussion about meeting less.
2. The role model solution: In every meeting you organise, include a purpose statement (e.g. “by the end of the meeting we will have…”), an agenda (with timings) and offer reasons for each of the people you’ve invited (“Helen, we really need your marketing brain on items 3, 4 and 5 of the agenda” and so on). All of this is observed by colleagues and encourages them to do the same. Brevity comes from clarity.
3. The ‘gentle pushback’ solution: If you can’t say no, your rule should be “no agenda, no meeting”. Why should you commit before you know what it actually is? The best practice version here is “no purpose statement, no meeting”. This helps clarify if you’re actually needed. You can also ask if it’s OK for you to make a cameo (in Helen’s case above “I’m pushed for time this week, would you mind if I just popped in for the relevant marketing agenda items?”).
4. The stealth solution: Make it harder to book time in your calendar for a meeting. Have rules. Mine is that I write during the morning and meet during the afternoon. Yours, probably, would be less extreme, but the point is to align your calendar with your intentions. Simple, but often-neglected. If you don’t think your colleagues would respect seeing things like “’heads-down work time” in your diary, then change it to something stealthy like “Project Magenta”. It sounds intriguing, confidential and important. They’ll leave you alone and work around it.
5. The naughty schoolboy solution: A lot of us have those regular meetings where you’re politically obligated to attend but don’t feel like you’re adding much value. If you’re not in a position to question the status quo, then set a secret ‘attend 1 in 3’ kind of policy for yourself — ‘keep your toe in’ but reclaim some time.
Productivity is more about what you say ‘no’ to than what you say ‘yes’ to. And if your ‘no’s’ never feel uncomfortable or like there’s a trade-off, you’re not saying ‘no’ often enough.
There are loads more about this in my book ‘How to Fix Meetings’ and my company, Think Productive, runs a whole range of workshops on this, specifically designed to help your organisation cut down on meetings as well as get the best of the ones you keep.
Belated Happy Mothers’ Day. And whilst a lot of stuff feels bleak right now, there’s a lot to be thankful for, too. As Barack used to say, “progress does not always move in a straight line”.
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