What to do when everyone’s sick of meetings

Knowledge workers are stretched thin.

In Microsoft’s most recent Work Trend Index survey of 31,000 workers across 31 countries, 64% said they struggle to find the time and energy to complete all of the tasks for their jobs. 

This may be particularly true in tech, where reduced workforces and tightening budgets are driving teams to hit their targets with ever-fewer resources. But there’s another pesky culprit for workers’ shortness on time: Meetings. 

Early last year, Microsoft found that the average number of work meetings attended by Microsoft Teams users more than doubled between February 2020 and February 2022, adding up to a 300% increase in meeting-time expenditure during the COVID-19 pandemic.

White remote working practices matured during this period, and teams found ways to maintain camaraderie, communicate team objectives, and coordinate work, it wasn’t long before the onslaught of video meetings began to drag down people’s workdays, a phenomenon that soon became known as ‘Zoom fatigue.’

Though many workers have since returned to the office for at least part of the workweek, the scourge of time-consuming meetings continues. Microsoft’s survey found that “having inefficient meetings” was the number-one barrier to productivity cited by today’s white-collar workforce, with “too many meetings” not far behind in third place. For engineers, whose daily work requires deep and uninterrupted focus, meetings often feel like an especially pointless and costly use of time.   

Workers simply aren’t being afforded the amount of focus time needed to execute the work they were hired to do, and meetings are largely to blame. There are, however, solutions to today’s meeting malaise, and leaders have the power to put them into action.

The situation in tech

Scott Dylan, a Dublin-based tech entrepreneur and the founder of the AI venture capital fund NexaTech Ventures, vividly recalls the moment in mid-2020 when meeting culture took over his own workdays.

“At first, the increased communication was necessary to maintain alignment across teams that were no longer in the same physical space,” Dylan said. “However, it quickly became clear that meetings were creeping into every available gap in our engineers’ schedules, leaving little time for deep, focused work. Engineers thrive on flow states, and meetings disrupt this essential rhythm.”

Ashot Nanayan, the Yerevan-based CEO and founder of the SEO and web design agency Digital World Institute, experienced a similar realization when his team transitioned to remote work in 2020. Although the initial changeover required additional communication and coordination, it produced the unintended consequence of more meetings. “This was primarily driven by a need to keep connected and ensure everyone was on the same page, but was starting to cut into focus time for our engineers,” Nanayan said. 

Nanayan’s engineers also began to notice that when switching from meetings to focus work, it would take time and energy to get back on task – an observation consistent with psychological research on the cognitive costs of task-switching. The psychologist David Meyer, who co-authored a 2001 study on the brain’s ability to manage and control thoughts and actions while switching tasks, has said that the momentary “blocks” that occur when changing tasks can burn as much as 40% of an individual’s productive time.

“One of the drivers for the proliferation of meetings is the misunderstanding that the more people communicate, the better the productivity,” Nanayan observed. “While being better informed is important, there is a thin line between collaboration and interruption.” 

Giving time back

Despite the hazards they pose to employees’ productivity, meetings do offer critical value to organizations. A recent study termed this predicament the “meeting load paradox,” showing that as the number of meetings increases, meeting participation, engagement, and creativity among employees also increases up to a point, then declines, forming an inverted-U effect. To sum it up, researchers wrote: “People need meetings. Teams need meetings. However, there are costs associated with having more or fewer meetings.”

The authors view the meeting load paradox as a management problem that can be alleviated by regularly auditing which meetings are necessary and using asynchronous communication methods to replace the ones that aren’t.

Managers should also make sure that whatever meetings do occur are run effectively and efficiently. Every meeting should have an agenda that is available to all participants in advance, which makes clear the meeting goals and topics, as well as the amount of time allotted to each point of discussion. It is important that meetings follow their agendas, and that they be run on time. Fewer, better-run meetings can accomplish a lot of heavy strategic lifting in a single expeditious push.

Workers notice the difference. Paul Senechko is VP of engineering at Customer.io, where engineers are expected to complete a quarterly developer-experience survey. He said his engineers report feeling that the company protects their time from too many meetings, thanks to concerted leadership efforts to create a culture that relies on alternative methods for communication.

These efforts are partly by necessity. As a fully remote, global organization, Senechko’s team members aren’t always available for meetings at convenient times. To address this, the company has had to adopt a writing-centric culture. Communication occurs asynchronously, often with delayed responses on Slack, and longer proposals are documented in Notion. The company has also had to be effective in communicating its vision in writing, establishing and articulating clear goals with practical plans of action, and empowering team leaders to sign off on technical decisions

“Regardless of if you are in-person or not, leaning into a culture of writing, communicating clearly and succinctly on Slack, and setting the precedent that teammates should respond as quickly as they reasonably can, all contributes to reducing the need for meetings for both individual contributors and managers,” Senechko said. “Most decisions and problems can be solved by articulating your ask on paper – or Notion or Slack – rather than jumping into a meeting.”

Dylan’s team has similarly adopted asynchronous messaging via Slack to replace unnecessary facetime, in addition to “focused work blocks” – meeting-free afternoons on specific days of the week that give developers undisturbed time to devote to their tasks. 

The company also conducts quarterly meeting audits in which the team evaluates the necessity of recurring meetings. “If a meeting isn’t driving value or could be consolidated, it’s scrapped,” Dylan said. Finally, he encourages engineers to decline meetings that aren’t directly relevant to their work.

“Ultimately, the goal is to shift the balance from planning and strategy discussions back to execution, which is where the real value is created,” Dylan said. “By trimming unnecessary meetings and focusing on better communication practices, we’ve found a way to give our teams more of their day back.”