Enough with the stupid meetings! 6 ways to reel in unproductive time

Enough with the stupid meetings! Most workplaces jacked up meetings – the Zoom kind – during the pandemic to help employees stay connected.

Now it’s just overkill.

A Microsoft analysis of its software found meetings doubled between 2020 and 2022 and meeting time tripled!

So this shouldn’t be too surprising: Almost half of employees say they have to attend too many unnecessary meetings, an Otter.ai survey found.

But meetings aren’t just a time-sucking nuisance. They hurt business. Otter.ai found companies spend as much as $80k per year per employee on meetings – and could save about $25k per employee if they just cut stupid meetings.

Companies willing to cut stupid meetings

Some companies have listened to pleas for freedom from meetings. Famously, Shopify cut 12,000 events – mostly recurring meetings of two or more people – from employees’ calendars. With that, they freed up about 95,000 hours.

TechSmith tried one month without synchronous – real-time, in person – meetings. They called it An Experiment to Build an Async-First Culture. And guess what? It worked pretty damn well.

“The experiment proved that employees could produce great work anywhere and anytime. But we learned that you cannot satisfy the ‘anytime’ aspect of flexible work without a healthy dose of asynchronous communication,” says Amy Casciotti, Vice President of Human Resources at TechSmith. “An added benefit of Async-First was that employees experienced more autonomy in the workplace.”

Systematically and thoughtfully reducing meetings can help HR and the entire organization reel in unproductive time.

Here are six keys to eliminating stupid meetings:

Curb the pressure

Most employees would like to decline a third of the meetings they’re asked to attend. But they only get out of about 15% of them, the Otter.ai survey found.

Why don’t they just turn down meetings? They think:

• they’ll upset or offend the meeting organizer
• colleagues will think they’re not engaged, or
• they’d be a bother asking a co-worker to bring them up to speed.

Ask employees to identify an actionable reason they need to be part of a meeting. If they can’t find it, encourage them to decline.

Increase asynchronous meetings

The crux of TechSmith’s experiment to curb meeting time was a shift to more async meetings.

Once they did it, 85% of employees now consider replacing meetings with async communication – using email, document sharing apps, chat functions and beyond to collaborate. More interesting was the 8% jump in perceived importance of meetings.

“The absence of meetings allowed employees to think more critically about how they use synchronous time together,” says Casciotti. “Our goal wasn’t to erase meetings because they are inherently bad. They’re not. It was because we believed employees sometimes use meetings to address work where other forms of communication are better and more efficient.”

Get serious

Shopify took a hard stance. And if you really want to cut back on meetings and unproductive time, you will want to set serious boundaries, too.

For example, Shopify essentially canceled all recurring group meetings, banned most Wednesday meetings and required that anything that included 50 or more people had to happen in a six-hour window on Thursdays.

Rules like these truly limited managers’ reach when it came to calling for meetings.

Amp up communication

Of course, limiting meetings means increasing other communication. TechSmith prepared for that from the get-go.

“As we prepared our new hybrid-work environment, we realized that flexibility around when and where our employees worked would be essential. We needed to find a way to optimize this process,” says Casciotti. “Rather than enforcing a set tech stack, we encouraged our teams to leverage workplace communication applications that best meet their unique needs.”

At TechSmith, they relied more than ever on Slack and email for messaging, two project management apps, and their own Snagit tool for screen capture and video messages to clarify and add context.

Rethink how you meet

Remember, meetings aren’t inherently bad. Teams collaborate more naturally and accomplish things in meetings. But how we meet is usually the issue – one person in charge of an agenda, leading a group of half-interested people through information-sharing, problem-solving or decision-making.

Try something different: TechSmith created a “flipped meeting” to maximize necessary meetings while saving time. The meeting lead records a brief video with details to add context and sends it to the other participants ahead of time so they’re ready to speak when the time comes.

Set guidelines

Give front-line managers and employees some direction on how they should meet based on what they need to accomplish. For instance, meet face-to-face (even via video) for confidential, complex or sensitive subjects. Use asynchronous meetings for idea sharing and voting.

“Before welcoming anyone back to the office {into a hybrid schedule from a remote one}, we clearly defined and identified the strengths of each communication type – i.e. asynchronous, synchronous, in-person – for specific work tasks so all teams can decide the best way to collaborate on company activities and interactions,” Casciotti says.