Anthony Onesto argues meetings waste time and money, citing research showing workers spend 23 hours a week in them. He proposes three fixes: cut unnecessary meetings, use 50 and 25 minute defaults instead of hour-long ones, and require agendas with clear roles for facilitators and participants.
Do you feel like you're in back to back meetings these days? You're probably right. Here are three ways to reimagine meetings within your organization. Everyone, it's Anthony Honesto and this is my burn the box drop for this week. We are talking about meetings. In fact, McKinsey pontificates, saying that meetings are just not simply placeholders in our calendars, but these pivotal forums for innovation and decisive corporate action. I believe what McKinsey is saying. Meetings are incredibly important, but the way we're doing meetings is not working. And, and so first, before we jump into the three solutions, let's take a look at the numbers like we always do. So first of all, Atlassian has done research and they have shown that employees partake in 62 meetings monthly, half of which are deemed ineffective. 62 meetings, half are ineffective. Steve Rogenberg, who's a professor out of North Carolina, has studied and wrote a book on this and says that meetings have now occupied up to 23 hours of an executive's week. That's an uptick from that from the 1960s. Salary.com has said meetings are dubbed a top productivity impediment, and that's echoed by 47% of the workforce. Revio Labs, who's one of my favorite researchers. They underscore the link between an excess of meetings and the erosion of employee morale and company culture. And last but certainly not least, we actually ran a survey on suzy. We asked 250us based full part time employees what their most significant time thief was at work. And while most said my phone over there, the second was meetings. So how do we fix this? Well, we can go in a draconian way like Shopify did and remove all meetings. I don't think that's the answer. It's never one or the other. It's always in the middle. In fact, what I'm hearing, this is not confirmed, that there's now no meeting theater where they're not putting meetings on the calendar for fear of retribution, but they're having secret meetings that likely would impress the most CIA agents out there. The way we did this at Suzy and the way I've been mandated to work on this, I thought of it in three different pillars. That's my thing. I love things in threes. First of all, what I wanted to do is reduce the amount of meetings. Yes, we're in too many meetings. So instead of just saying, hey, no meeting is valuable, which McKinsey would disagree with, I'm saying strategically reduce your meetings. First, look at the repetitive ones, by the way, in Steven's book the Science of Meetings, he showed that when people are surveyed about a meeting, everyone thinks the meeting was not valuable at all, except for the person creating the meeting. We love our own meetings. So take a look at your own meetings that are recurring or one time and remove them. Can they be emails? Can you put it on a Confluence page? Can it be a slack? Set a tangible objective to decrease the number of meetings over time. And what happens is that will compound. If you do 5% a month, you're going to compound that. Now, we're not going to net zero in meetings like Shopify, but a reasonable reduction in meeting times. Second, you want to optimize time and attendance so you don't need the full hour. This is why we feel like we're on zoom after zoom after zoom after zoom or zoom, because we are. We're in these things for an hour, we have no break, and then we're on to the next one. Think about removing your hour and making it 50 minutes and putting that as a default into your calendar invites. Make it 30 minutes. What is the real. Why do we, you know, an hour kind of is just our instinct for a meeting, but most meetings could likely be done in 25 minutes. So if you're doing a half an hour minute, half an hour meeting, make it 25. If it's an hour, bring it down to 50. Giving people an opportunity to go get a drink, bio, break, whatever it is. Then look at the attendance of your meetings. How many people are in your meetings? Now that we're virtual, we have so many folks in our meetings. In fact, again, the study done by Stephen within his book, anything over seven participants, it's ineffective as a meeting. So look at seven. We picked five here at Suzy to mark as the amount of people that are in the meeting. These are folks. And then consider who's in the meeting and think about who's going to add value and then who needs to know? Those are called observers and those folks can get a recording of the meeting. There is Zoom. Now, Zoom has an AI functionality. While controversial, it allows you to record and set an update of that meeting. So there are people that don't necessarily add value in the meeting or need to be in that meeting, but need to know about whatever's happening in that meeting or the objectives coming out of that meeting. So reduce the amount of attendees. Now, this is outside of any sales meetings. This is all for internal meetings, but also any. All hands or any things like that. Take a look at them too. But this is more for those other meetings that we're having that have 20 people and most of them don't know why they're there. The last piece is that, you know, you can have a policy like we have here at Suzy. No agenda, no attendant. If there's no agenda, I'm not attending. In the research it says just having an agenda doesn't solve for it. Yes, that's why this is pillar number three, which is adding an agenda, making sure that every meeting that you set up as an objective. What is the meeting? We use this thing called conversation types. Is it a clarity conversation? Put the agenda in there. What are you going to be talking about and how long? That's a little bit more difficult to really estimate the different length of these conversations. But try to do it. Who's attending and what is their role? You as the facilitator, you are the quarterback of the meeting. But there are other folks that are going to participate. What is their role? And then understand if you have more than seven, or in our case five people who are the ones that don't necessarily need to be there but need to be observers, put them as optional in your calendar invite. So then what you're doing is you're creating a meeting where you have action items, you have an objective, you have agenda items, you have facilitators in everyone's role. So you would create a greater value or ROI on your meeting if you pre think all of these things before you send out that meeting. So we all know the benefits of reimagined meetings. You become more strategic. Every meeting has an ROI attached to it. Every meeting you're inviting people, you're spending the company's money. Imagine if we went out and said I want to spend a hundred thousand dollars on a meeting or a bunch of meetings and didn't put it through our normal PO processes. This is a thing where we can increase productivity, you can increase innovation. The things from a business result. You want to increase your revenue, you want to increase your customer stickiness, you want to increase all stakeholder value. Reduce. Look at these three pillars again. Quick reminder. Strategic meeting reduction. Optimize the time and attendance of those meetings and then create more valuable meetings. This is in contradiction to Spotify who believes, excuse me, Shopify, who believes that no meeting is valuable. I think like McKinsey, meetings are a valuable part and create stakeholder value. So remember those three pillars. Let me know in the comments if you've tried this out and see how it works in your organization. We'll see you next time. That's my quick drop.
