So you’ve been invited to another meeting

Meetings. Catchups, Check ins, Status reports, Quarterly reviews, Project updates, Governance boards, Management meetings, team meetings, department meetings, all hands? Do you sometimes wonder: how do I fit in the work around all these meetings?

You’re an enlightened, nuanced thinker who isn’t afraid to challenge the status quo. You’re happy to make bold changes. But you can’t because your diary is filled with blue rectangles butting up against each other and even overlapping. Teams calls, Zoom meetings, Slack Huddles, whatever Google’s meeting system is currently called. Your day is filled.

If it feels like more and more of your time is spent in unnecessary meetings, that’s because it is. Research shows that time spent in meetings is steadily increasing. The average full-time white-collar professional in the United States spends 21.5 hours a week in meetings. In one HBR study of senior managers, 65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work. 71% said meetings were unproductive and inefficient. Another study estimated uunnecessary meetings waste $37 billion in salary hours a year in the U.S. alone. Productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%.

“White-collar work has become a bonanza of meetings,” Derek Thompson says in The Atlantic.

Everyone is exhausted by meetings.

And yet we keep having them.

Much of the research into meetings has focused on how to make them better. Set an agenda. Make sure everyone feels respected. Start and end on time. But these actions have had limited impact and no amount of good chairing is going to turn an unnecessary meeting into a necessary one.

Part of the issue is that we don’t know how to stop having meetings.

“Ruthlessly avoid and cancel meetings,” Arthur C Brooks writes in The Atlantic. But even he admits in the very next paragraph: “Take this advice with caution if you are an employee.” As he points out, you can’t just not attend meetings and give the excuse: “Because I read an article in The Atlantic.”

The social or political cost of declining meetings is often greater than the cost of going to them. Declining meetings seems rude. Outlook sends a red cross back to the originator. They declined your meeting. They rejected you. These declines can damage relationships. And also, what if you are missing out? What if something important is discussed in that meeting? What if the boss is there and wants to know why you’re not? Being seen is important. It’s safer to go to a meeting even if won’t be a good use of your time.

It’s not me it’s you

The worst meetings are the ones everyone else organises. The ones I organise are a well-thought through fantastic use of everyone’s time.

This is the heart of the problem. Sometimes, the reason we put in meetings is because we need something that involves other people. We have a question they can answer. It might be worth inviting someone from Legal as well just in case. And maybe it’s worth having someone from Policy too. The benefit is to us. But the cost is to everyone who attends. They give their time, and in exchange, we move forward our ambitions.

This cost benefit asymmetry is part of the meeting problem. The person who schedules the meeting may get a benefit, even if no one else does. We have turned calendars into a common resource, and so meeting scheduling has become a tragedy of the commons. We carry on organising meetings that waste others time, even while moaning about all the meetings other people organise that waste ours.

There is no cost to us for putting in another meeting. But there is a cost to us for not putting in another meeting. And so, we have another meeting. And another.

If all you have is a calendar, everything looks like a meeting

There is a cost to meetings. It is just borne by the company and invisible to staff. For all the financial controls a company has around spending money, there are no controls on who can call a meeting with whom. The most junior employee in a company, with no financial budget can still schedule a meeting with multiple other people and consume their time.

An HBR study added up all the secondary meetings that were needed to plan and prep for one executive committee board. This one meeting consumed 300,000 staff hours a year (equivalent to around 200 people full time).

This meeting series cost around £15,000,000 every year.

The company never allocated this budget to this meeting. It never decided that was a good use of resources. It just… sort of happened.

Ahead of your time

Complaining about there being too many meetings feels like complaining about the weather. Meetings are a force of nature. They are the way things are. You can’t change meetings as they’re just the cost of doing business.

The change is too big to make happen on your own. Suggesting that we should have fewer meetings feels like asking for world peace. Even suggesting it might make you seem slightly fey or out of touch. It has the hint of hippiness about it. It sounds like your whining or moaning. It’s not the sort of change a manager can implement. It would require too many behavior changes, across too many parts of an organization. It would require people to find alternatives, it would require policing. It would require positive and negative incentives to drive behavior.

Meetings proliferate because there is no cost to them

One of the things that we have come to believe is that technology can be a powerful lever for human change. This is not to say that technology can solve human problems, but technology can be an effort multiplier that can cause things to happen that wouldn’t be possible without it.

To bring about a change in behaviour, we need a consistent process or system to nudge people towards the behaviour we want. We don’t want to stop meetings entirely, as some meetings are necessary. But we want to increase the friction and personal cost of meetings slightly so that the cost to adding a meeting is in line with the cost of attending one.

Managing within budget

Simplex Mobile is running a trial of introducing meeting budgets. That is, in the same way that employees have a financial budget, they also have a budget of the amount of other people’s time within the company they can consume.

Each individual in the company receives a budget of the number of meeting hours they are allowed to allocate. Once they reach their limit, they are no longer able to schedule meetings until the next budget period. Each user receives a weekly summary of meeting hours used and how many are remaining and receives warnings as they approach their limit.

Consumed time is a factor of two things.

1. The length of the meeting
2. The number of people in the meeting

Fewer meetings are better. Shorter meetings are more productive. Meetings with fewer people in achieve more. The aim is that people will spend a few seconds thinking more carefully about their meetings to save tens of hours of wasted meeting time.

Person time is a precious resource. We want it to be treated that way.

The proof is in the pudding

We're looking for forward-thinking companies who are worried about how meetings are expanding to fill their time to join us in a free experiment to see how technology could help your teams change their meeting behaviour.

What we ask is:

1. Have a conversation with us about our programme, how this might work within your company and what you might need to make this a success.
2. Connect our solution to your calendar solution
3. Activate it in monitor mode to see what insights we can generate for you about your company meeting patterns
4. Run a short trial with meeting budgets to see how your company responds
5. Allow us to debrief you to discuss the results.

At any time during the programme, you are free to opt out or end the experiment.

Show me the sign-up button

If you are one of the free-thinking companies who are looking for ways to be more productive and you wish to find out more please fill in your details below for us to arrange an initial meeting (yes, we are aware of the irony).