COMPANIES SCALING BACK ON EXCESSIVE NUMBER OF MEETINGS
From no-meeting Wednesdays to focus weeks, firms finding ways to lessen workers’ Zoom overload
Meetings are a headache for office workers everywhere. And recently, Joshua Zerkel hit his breaking point.
“I was looking at my own calendar, wanting to cry,” he said about the back-to-back meetings that made it difficult to get anything done.
So Zerkel, head of global engagement marketing at enterprise work management platform Asana, escalated his concerns about meeting bloat to the head of an internal think tank that researches and offers strategies for making work more efficient. The concerns inspired the lab to try an experiment that temporarily cancels recurring meetings and asks people to rebuild their calendars from scratch. They called it “meetings doomsday.”
“It’s definitely better now,” Zerkel said about the experiment.
Meeting overload continues to be a big problem for many office workers. In general, 68 percent of people say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, according to a study Microsoft released last year.
Companies scaled up meetings during the height of the coronavirus pandemic to stay connected to workers, many of whom were confined to their homes.
But years later, even as many people work from the office at least part time, the overwhelming number of video meetings remains. Some companies have been rethinking their meeting culture and cutting way back to reduce exhaustion and boost productivity.
“Right now there’s an all-timehigh interest in (fixing) meetings,” said Steven Rogelberg, meetings expert and professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “There’s recognition that we can do better.”
Since February 2020, Microsoft Teams users have three times more meetings and calls per week, the company reported. Workers reported that too many and inefficient meetings were two of the top three obstacles to productivity.
To remedy this, Asana, which already had no-meeting Wednesdays, debuted its meetings doomsday experiment. Zerkel’s team of nine was asked to delete all meetings from their calendar, wait two days and then consider which ones needed to be restored.
Each participant saved 11 hours per month, said Rebecca Hinds, head of the think tank called the Work Innovation Lab. The small experiment led to a larger 60person experiment, which ultimately led the lab to release a meetings doomsday playbook that tells teams how to do it for themselves.
“The biggest change I’ve seen is more thoughtfulness around scheduling and structuring meetings,” Hinds said, adding that leaders encourage people to decline meetings they don’t consider valuable. “It’s more common to cancel meetings if the agenda is light or if a good majority can be done (at different times).”
Shopify, an e-commerce platform, took things further. Last January,
the company asked employees to cancel all meetings, wait two weeks before adding anything back, and leave Wednesdays clear.
As of July, the average time each person spent in meetings was down 14 percent compared with the first five months of the previous year and the company was on track to ship about 18 percent more projects by the end of 2023, the company said.
Going further, software firm Techsmith in 2022 did an entire month with no meetings, asking employees to instead collaborate in other ways. Afterward, the company experienced a reduction in standing meetings and an increase in alternate communication forms such as video messaging.
Employee surveys showed a 15 percent increase in employees feeling “very productive,” with 85 percent saying they identified meetings they would eliminate or shorten going forward. Meetings became shorter and the number of participants in meetings was also
reduced.
“The number one benefit is employee well-being,” said CEO Wendy Hamilton. “It’s about protecting the energy of employees so they can do their best work when they’re working.”
Clearing the calendar
Other companies say they’re still tweaking their strategy.
In 2022, Zapier, a workflow automation platform, opted to institute a focus week. Each employee set a goal and prioritized that work for the entire week. Meetings weren’t banned, but general and recurring meetings were discouraged.
Eighty percent of employees said they accomplished their goal, said Chief People Officer Brandon Sammut. Collectively, employees reportedly saved thousands of hours of meeting time that week. Shaking up employees’ normal rhythms also forced them to rethink whether certain meetings were needed. The company now hosts a focus week quarterly.
“It opened time on my calendar to get projects
done that I couldn’t get done before,” said Danny Schreiber, senior business operations manager, adding that leaders expect workers to share what they accomplished during the week. “It feels really good to not only share what you did, but to hear what other folks did.”
Slack similarly officially implemented Maker Week and Focus Fridays in the summer of 2022 to allow employees to do heads-down work without interruptions. But the company has also been testing things such as cutting meetings in half and encouraging more breaks,
and testing new AI tools in Slack that can summarize meetings and channels to allow people to skip some meetings.
“Meetings are often at the root of a lot of problems, so it feels like such a critical problem to solve,” said Christina Janzer, Slack senior vice president of research and analytics.
An experiment at Atlassian in September turned into new guidance the company rolled out in December.
A group of researchers on the company’s Team Anywhere Lab, which focuses on tackling the biggest challenges associated with distributed work, asked 60 workers to make prescheduled meetings no more than about 30 percent of their week.
They were also asked to block 30 to 40 percent of their week for focus time and avoid instantly responding to inbound messages, limiting that time to 20 percent of the week. Half were asked to reflect on their top priority the next day and design the day around that.
Employees reported a 32 percent improvement in focus and 31 percent more progress on top priorities.
“Overall, this guidance helped everyone a lot,” said Molly Sands, head of the lab. “They reported less exhaustion, which was really important.”
The results were lasting, said Annaliese McGavin, an Atlassian employee who participated in the experiment. McGavin’s team still has meetings, but they’re grouping them together “so we can have bigger chunks for focus time,” she said. Her favorite change was not responding to messages instantly. “It was like a golden ticket,” she said.
Deliberate action
Of course, these changes have their challenges.
Guidance and policies don’t always affect everyone equally (customer service representatives can’t reject meetings as they please, for example). Global time zones can also make it harder to coordinate, cancel or reschedule meetings.
Getting everyone to buy in can also be hard. And in some cases, reducing meetings also diminishes the chances less-experienced workers have to learn from watching others.
Rogelberg, the professor who advises companies on meeting culture, said the most effective strategies take a top-down and bottom-up approach, giving leaders responsibility for executing the plan and encouraging others to participate and allowing employees to take ownership as a policy gets developed.
“When taken together, you shock the system ... and change meeting culture,” he said.
Zerkel is grateful his work life has changed. But “it’s up to us ... to be brave and bold and try new things,” Zerkel said. “It’s not going to fix itself.”