Bored with the stupid meetings! Use 8 method to reel in unproductive time
Meetings, however, are more than just a waste of time. It was detrimental to business. Otter.ai discovered that companies spend up to $80k per year per employee on meetings - and could save up to $25k per employee if they simply eliminated ineffective meetings.
Bored with the stupid meetings! Use 7 method to reel in unproductive time
Bored with the stupid meetings! Now a time, most workplaces jacked up meetings – the virtual kind! During the pandemic, most workplaces increased virtual meetings to help employees stay connected.
It is now simply overkilling the organization’s productivity.
According to a Microsoft software analysis, meetings doubled between 2020 and 2022, and meeting time tripled!
So it’s not surprising that almost half of employees say they have to attend too many unnecessary meetings, according to an Otter.ai survey.
Meetings, however, are more than just a waste of time. It was detrimental to business. Otter.ai discovered that companies spend up to $80k per year per employee on meetings – and could save up to $25k per employee if they simply eliminated ineffective meetings.
Companies willing to cut ineffective meetings
Some businesses have heeded calls for meeting-free zones. Shopify famously removed 12,000 events from employees’ calendars, most of which were recurring meetings of two or more people. They saved approximately 95,000 hours as a result of this.
TechSmith experimented with one month of no synchronous – real-time, in-person – meetings. It was dubbed “An Experiment to Build an Async-First Culture.” And guess what they discovered? It was extremely beneficial to the organisation.
“The experiment demonstrated that employees could produce excellent work anywhere and at any time.” “However, we discovered that you can’t satisfy the ‘anytime’ aspect of flexible work without a healthy dose of asynchronous communication,” says Amy Casciotti, TechSmith’s Vice President of Human Resources. “Another advantage of Async-First was that employees had more autonomy in the workplace.”
Reducing meetings in a systematic and thoughtful manner can assist HR and the entire organisation in reducing unproductive time.
Here are eight methods for avoiding ineffective meetings at work:
Reduce the stress.
Most employees would prefer to skip one-third of the meetings they are required to attend. According to the Otter.ai survey, they only get out of about 15% of them.
Why don’t they just decline meetings? They believe:
They’ll irritate or offend the meeting organiser, and their colleagues will think they’re not engaged, or they’ll be a bother asking a coworker to catch them up.
Request that employees identify an actionable reason why they must attend a meeting. If they are unable to locate it, encourage them to decline.
Increase the number of asynchronous meetings.
The pivotal point of TechSmith’s experiment to reduce meeting time was a shift towards more async meetings.
After doing so, 85% of employees now consider replacing meetings with async communication – collaborating via email, document sharing apps, chat functions, and other means. The 8% increase in perceived importance of meetings was more intriguing.
“The lack of meetings allowed employees to think more critically about how they use synchronous time together,” Casciotti explains. “Our intention was not to eliminate meetings because they are inherently bad. They aren’t. We believed that meetings were sometimes used by employees to address work issues when other forms of communication were better and more efficient.”
Set firm boundaries.
Shopify took an aggressive stance. And, if you truly want to reduce meetings and unproductive time, you will need to establish firm boundaries as well.
Shopify, for example, effectively cancelled all recurring group meetings, prohibited most Wednesday meetings, and mandated that anything involving 50 or more people take place on Thursdays within a six-hour window.
When it came to calling meetings, rules like these severely limited managers’ options.
Increase communication
Naturally, limiting meetings means increasing other forms of communication. TechSmith anticipated this from the start.
“As we planned our new hybrid-work environment, we realised that employee flexibility in terms of when and where they worked would be critical.” “We needed to find a way to optimise this process,” Casciotti explains. “Rather than imposing a predefined tech stack, we encouraged our teams to use workplace communication apps that best meet their specific needs.”
TechSmith relied 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 more than ever before.
Consider changing the way you meet
Remember that meetings aren’t always bad. Teams collaborate more naturally and achieve more in meetings. The issue is usually how we meet – one person in charge of an agenda, leading a group of half-interested people through information-sharing, problem-solving, or decision-making.
Attempt something new:
To maximise necessary meetings while saving time, TechSmith developed a “flipped meeting.” The meeting leader records a brief video with details to add context and sends it ahead of time to the other participants, so they are prepared to speak when the time comes.
Elon Musk’s formula must be tried.
Elon Musk is obsessed with efficiency in order to save time, communicate effectively, and maintain clear accountability.
1. Avoid large meetings (no more than 6 people) unless you are absolutely certain they will provide value to the entire audience, in which case keep them brief.
2. Eliminate frequent meetings unless you have an urgent matter that requires them. Once the urgent matter is resolved, the frequency of meetings should rapidly decrease.
3. Never arrive late for a meeting. Be on time so that the meeting begins on time with everyone present and does not run over its allotted time, causing the next meeting to be delayed.
4. Be well-prepared. You are wasting your time and the time of others by arriving unprepared and unable to answer questions about your department.
5. Stick to the schedule. Don’t carry on. If you finish sooner than expected, end the meeting; there’s no need to sit around and fill in the time.
6. Leave the meeting as soon as you’re not adding any more value. It is not rude to leave if handled properly, but it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.
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.
