Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify recently became the latest organisation to take an axe to meetings. All recurring meetings with more than two people have been banned, Wednesdays are meeting free and big meetings – of 50+ people – have to fit a six-hour window on Thursdays and are limited to one a week. You may now be thinking ‘good for them, I wish’ or ‘whaaat?’
Depending on your point of view meetings are the life blood of business or they’re the bane and you’ll probably find more in the bane camp.
But have meetings got a bad rap and, if so, whose fault is it? They certainly eat time and have mushroomed through Covid and WFH which removes the more casual encounters and information exchanges we get through being in the office.
An analysis from Reclaim.ai suggests one to one meetings have increased by more than 500 per cent since before the pandemic with the average worker spending 21.5 hours a week in meetings (vs 14.2 pre-Covid). Another study, reported in the MIT Sloan Management Review, found that banning meetings one day a week boosted productivity by 35 per cent. This increased to 71 per cent with a two-day ban and 73 per cent with a three-day ban.
The temptation here is obvious. However, the meeting is an important, even essential part of the organisational toolkit if used wisely.
That means deep consideration given to the purpose of the meeting and how the time will be used productively. We must ask ‘what’s the intention here?’ so we know, definitively, whether we need to meet. If it’s information sharing we don’t. If it’s meaning making to generate action we probably do.
Many regular meetings fall into an ever-deepening rut. Faithful attendees turn up, follow the same agenda and can feel like they’re involved in the same conversation as last time and the time before. The only thing that tells us this isn’t groundhog day is the date.
If it’s our meeting we need to be courageous and shake things up, often – throwing out the old and redrawing the agenda.
And we must consider the ‘social’ aspect of meeting. Bringing people together offers the opportunity for bonds to be strengthened, relationships deepened, ideas to be floated and tested, all present to have a voice. It also allows us to check, irrespective of whether we’re together physically or virtually, how people are really doing and feeling. We remove this opportunity at our peril.
The real challenge is to make the time spent together count so we can be sure we lose nothing in the meetings we drop.