While before the pandemic, meetings were notorious for undermining workers’ productivity (Doodle, 2019), they at least provided an opportunity for informal socializing. However, in a context where many hybrid organizations now hold these meetings virtually to accommodate remote work and in-office employees, it’s worth questioning their relevance.
Let’s start with a post-pandemic overview. According to a 2022 study: the length of meetings has decreased by 20%, while the frequency has increased by 13.5%. Junior managers seem to have a penchant for “meeting mania,” as they schedule 29% more meetings than their more experienced colleagues.
Ultimately, no one is satisfied with the situation. According to a literature review, 92% of employees consider meetings to be “costly and unproductive.” If we rely on internal Slack data, a red flag should go up when an employee approaches two hours per day of meetings.
Spending more than two hours per day in meetings is the tipping point at which the majority of employees claim to spend “too much time” in meetings, and this finding is shared across all levels of positions, as explained on Slack’s website. People who say they spend too much time in meetings are twice as likely to say they don’t have enough time to focus [on their work].
Cancel Button
Faced with this observation, major companies have decided to challenge the status quo and shake things up significantly. Their solution: simply cancel a significant proportion of meetings.
This is what Slack did by implementing two new internal practices: two weeks per quarter (the “Maker Weeks”), all meetings are canceled to dedicate all work time to creation and clients. Then, “Focus Fridays” are also exempt from meetings.
It’s a big step forward in giving our employees more autonomy over how they use their most precious resource: their time, said Stewart Butterfield, CEO and co-founder of Slack. As a company, we continue to invest in programs aimed at making work more enjoyable and efficient. With Focus Fridays and Maker Weeks, we promote more asynchronous collaboration, more efficient meeting management, and we free up more time to dedicate to work.
Last year, Spotify also tried to think outside the box by instituting a new meeting rule that banned all “recurring” meetings involving more than two people. This is in addition to a policy of Wednesdays without meetings. Here’s how Kaz Nejatian, COO and VP of Products at Shopify, explained the decision in an email to employees:
People join Shopify to build. To do cool things. To see what they have in their hands launched and say: wow, I did that. Meetings are a flaw that occurs along the way.
GitLab and Asana have also deployed similar initiatives aimed at “cleaning up” meetings.
Supported by a Study
More broadly, the idea of canceling meetings, or at least limiting their temporal expansion, seems to be based on solid grounds.
In 2022, a research team followed 76 companies – over a period of 14 months – that decided to reduce the number of meetings in their organization. The results speak for themselves: a 40% reduction in meetings resulted in a 71% increase in production.
When looking at the results in detail, all indicators are positive:
The conclusion is simple: tidy up your schedule and start working… really!
