For example, Simone Kauffeld, of Technische Universität Braunschweig, and Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, of the University of Amsterdam, found in a study of 20 organizations from the automotive supply, metal, electrical, chemical, and packaging industries that dysfunctional meeting behaviors (including wandering off topic, complaining, and criticizing) were associated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability. (In a recent study, managers across the board in the United States and China told us that this happens “far too often!”) As a consequence, people tend to come to work early, stay late, or use weekends for quiet time to concentrate.Īnother issue is the stiff price companies pay for badly run meetings. For another, schedules riddled with meetings interrupt “deep work”-a term that the Georgetown computer science professor Cal Newport uses to describe the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Every minute spent in a wasteful meeting eats into time for solo work that’s equally essential for creativity and efficiency. They overlook the collective toll on productivity, focus, and engagement.įor one thing, time is zero-sum. When they sacrifice their own time and well-being for meetings, they assume they’re doing what’s best for the business-and they don’t see the costs to the organization. But why would anyone argue in defense of excessive meetings, especially when no one likes them much?īecause executives want to be good soldiers. They often foster relationships and ensure proper information exchange. To be sure, meetings are essential for enabling collaboration, creativity, and innovation.
If the alternative to more meetings is more autocratic decision-making, less input from all levels throughout the organization, and fewer opportunities to ensure alignment and communication by personal interaction, then give me more meetings any time! I believe that our abundance of meetings at our company is the Cultural Tax we pay for the inclusive, learning environment that we want to foster…and I’m ok with that. Consider this excerpt from the corporate blog of a senior executive in the pharmaceutical industry: When we probed into why people put up with the strain that meetings place on their time and sanity, we found something surprising: Those who resent and dread meetings the most also defend them as a “necessary evil”-sometimes with great passion. Yet change of such scope is rarely considered. We’ve observed in our research and consulting that real improvement requires systemic change, because meetings affect how people collaborate and how they get their own work done. Much has been written about this problem, but the solutions posed are usually discrete: Establish a clear agenda, hold your meeting standing up, delegate someone to attend in your place, and so on.
And that doesn’t even include all the impromptu gatherings that don’t make it onto the schedule. Such complaints are supported by research showing that meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. One said, “I cannot get my head above water to breathe during the week.” Another described stabbing her leg with a pencil to stop from screaming during a particularly torturous staff meeting. In our interviews with hundreds of executives, in fields ranging from high tech and retail to pharmaceuticals and consulting, many said they felt overwhelmed by their meetings-whether formal or informal, traditional or agile, face-to-face or electronically mediated. But that pain has real consequences for teams and organizations. Poking fun at meetings is the stuff of Dilbert cartoons-we can all joke about how soul-sucking and painful they are.