2021. 11. 04. 13:43 Does banning meetings help workers get back their time?

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Does banning meetings help workers get back their time?

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By Alex Christian 2nd November 2021

Some companies are weeding calls out of calendars to boost worker productivity.
The idea is good in theory – but how about in practise?

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ictor Potrel hasn’t had a meeting in years. In 2019, when he began his executive

V role at digital-media company TheSoul Publishing working remotely from

London, there were no lengthy inductions; all the information he needed was
available via on-demand video. Nor did he need to block out hour-long

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2021. 11. 04. 13:43 Does banning meetings help workers get back their time? - BBC Worklife
calendar slots to liaise with his boss. Instead, he used Slack channels and software tools to
get up to speed on various teams and ongoing projects.

To this day, there are no scheduled meetings at Potrel’s workplace. Rather, employees can
book a direct one-on-one call with at least 24 hours’ notice in exceptional circumstances
only. “It has to be a very specific goal, not a general brainstorm that you can do with other
tools,” explains Potrel. “Most of the time, doing the preparatory work for a call makes you
realise you don’t even need one.”

For Potrel, the stringent no-meeting policy has been liberating. “It’s improved my work,” he
says. “It feels like you get to organise your own time, rather than have others do it for you.
For creatives, it means you can focus on your own expertise and where you add value – and
that’s not by discussing things in a meeting.”

Unlike Potrel, many workers spend large chunks of their day in conference rooms and on
virtual calls. Much of that time is wasted. Before Covid-19, one survey of 1,945 workers by
consulting firm Korn Ferry found that 67% of respondents felt that too many meetings
harmed their impact at work, with 34% wasting up to five hours per week on pointless
ones.

This meeting culture goes right to the top of organisations and, ironically, also affects those
sending the invites: research has shown that meetings keep most senior managers from
completing their work, with executives spending nearly 23 hours a week in them on
average.

Zoom has replaced many meetings during the pandemic. But video calls can be just as
unproductive as in-person gatherings and still pressure people to attend (Credit: Getty Images)

Remote working has only exacerbated the problem of excess meetings, with casual deskside
chats replaced by default half-hour Zoom calls. Analysis of employees' meeting invitations
at 21,500 global companies by Harvard Business School revealed that although meetings
were on average 12 minutes shorter versus pre-pandemic, people were attending 13% more
of them, with the number of invitees rising by 14%.

More meetings, for more employees, mean more fragmented workdays – which impacts on
productivity. Zoom fatigue creeps in, the risk of burnout spikes. Companies are taking
notice, with more and more businesses instituting meeting-free days. But does such a
policy really give workers back their back? Or can it actually lead to unintended
consequences – more confusion, emails, side conversations – creating even greater work?

How meetings bloomed

Humans are inherently social beings; our instinct to meet in order to strategise and share
ideas predates modern civilisation, let alone office culture. “We’ve gathered since caveman
days,” explains Steven Rogelberg, director of organisational science at the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte, US. “Meetings are a manifestation of human tendencies.”

As knowledge work boomed in the mid-20th Century, businesses gradually moved away
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organisations became flatter and less hierarchical. As start-ups flourished, so too did the
notion of the collective. Meetings became the best process to allow the coming together of
ideas, inspiring innovation.

“We’ve evolved to recognise that teams can reach greater heights through the process of
engaging with others, capturing employees’ voice and creating opportunities for synergy,”
says Rogelberg. “So, while meeting activity is human nature, it’s also an evolution on how to
truly drive and engage people.”

Once video-conferencing technology became more sophisticated throughout the 2010s,

meetings were no longer constrained by room size or office hours. However, being
permanently available comes with consequences. “People are inundated with meeting
requests,” adds Rogelberg. “It’s become too easy to take someone’s schedule away from
them. People don’t think – they just click ‘yes’ to the invite.”

It’s become too easy to take someone’s schedule away from

them. People don’t think – they just click ‘yes’ to the invite –
Steven Rogelberg
And while meetings can enable teams to brainstorm, align thinking and take decisive action,
the best meetings are few and far between. Without clear goals, meetings lose focus. They
often bloat – what should be a quick one-on-one conversation becomes an hour-long call
requiring entire teams. “We’re still a mess at them and have a long way to go,” says
Rogelberg. “There are so many issues: a dearth of meaningful training, a lack of feedback on
how well they’re run, and not enough facilitation from leaders to ensure everyone is
contributing.”

Bad meetings have knock-on effects that spill into the workday, as well as depriving workers
of their time. Meeting recovery syndrome, where workers ruminate post-meeting, can dent
productivity. Constant context switching comes at a cost: it’s a form of multitasking, which
our brains aren’t built to handle. “Every time you switch your attention from one thing to
another, you pay for that switch in terms of time and energy,” explains Sahar Yousef,
cognitive neuroscientist at University of California, Berkeley.

New, better tools?

It’s little wonder, then, that some companies have banned meetings, either permanently or
for specific days each week. Many tech-related start-ups, which often employ remote
workers in different time zones, like TheSoul Publishing, prioritise efficient asynchronous
communication rather than live calls. But since the pandemic, amid hybrid working and
concerns regarding Zoom overload, bosses in other sectors are also re-thinking meeting
habits.

Asana, a US-based start-up that provides work-management tools to businesses, has a

company-wide meeting ban on Wednesdays. Its global research has showed that
unnecessary meetings have increased by an hour per week on average since the pandemic.
Its own ban is “a commitment to focus and flow”, says Anne Raimondi, Asana’s chief
operating officer and head of business. “From designers, to programmers, to customer-
facing employees – you have work you can only get into with uninterrupted blocks of time.”

Forbidding meetings once a week not only gives Asana employees more time to focus on
their work, says Raimondi, but it also provides stronger meeting structures during the
remaining workdays. “Having the no-meeting day in the middle of the week is helpful for
workflow – everyone knows there’s time to go in depth on something related to strategy or
planning. Then, I have the opportunity to craft good agendas for when we do meet.”

TheSoul Publishing has gone to more extreme lengths with its blanket ban on meetings.
Internal emails are also prohibited, meaning its script writers, animators and editors can
focus nearly exclusively on heads-down creative work. Rather than direct calls, written
communication in programs like Slack is encouraged. Meetings, however, aren’t replaced by
a deluge of direct messaging.

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Experts say meetings shouldn't be eliminated altogether, but rather seriously re-evaluate how
they're run and how long they take (Credit: Getty Images)

“We use platforms optimised for asynchronous communication,” explains Potrel. “It means
information is transparent, concise and can be accessed by anyone – whenever and wherever
they are. Business has evolved, and meetings aren’t a modern tool. We’ve found better ones
to manage and organise information.”

Even the company’s brainstorming sessions don’t happen in person. Instead, written ideas
are submitted for production teams to review. But Potrel does not believe that means
employees miss out on human connections. “When people focus on the task at hand, they
form professional relationships,” he says. “They interact with others towards the same goal.
They can share interests on Slack channels and meet outside of work. You don’t need
socialised moments in meetings for people to feel connected.”

Well-meaning initiatives?

Emptying calendars of meetings may seem like a productivity win-win. Asana and TheSoul
Publishing introduced meeting bans soon after they were founded; their policies are deeply
embedded into their corporate cultures. Banishing meetings for growth companies down
the line, however, is a much harder task. Raimondi says she’s been at organisations where
they’ve tried to introduce guidance around meetings and put bans in place, but their impact
has been limited. “Rather than have a day full of calls, you just end up with one three-
quarters full instead.”

A common pitfall is that the unproductive Zoom calls are simply pushed to either side of the
meeting-free day. Worse, time-stretched managers sometimes ignore company policy: they
see a yawning gap in workers’ schedules on a no-meeting day, and set up an hour-long call.
Employees, meanwhile, presume the meeting must be important and feel obliged to attend
– a well-meaning initiative ends up being counterproductive. “People creating these policies
don’t necessarily honour them,” says Rogelberg.

There can be other unintended consequences, too. Meetings can be a surprisingly efficient
way of exchanging information. Without alternatives in place, a quick question during a
morning catch-up can be replaced by email ping-pong – a workday is spent tackling an
insurmountable inbox.

And although Potrel says he doesn’t miss connection without meetings, some experts say
meetings do give us necessary collaborative benefits. “I think in-person meetings can be
really effective,” says Eleanor O’Mahony, of Ireland-based employee-communication
platform Workvivo. “It’s much easier doing brainstorming sessions with a change of scenery.
The functional meetings can be kept virtual. It's about using the right medium at the right
time.”

Reform, not remove

The no-meeting trend is fairly new: there's little concrete data to support whether it works
and what gets lost. It’s why most of the discussion around it is anecdotal. However, it seems

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that without addressing pre-existing issues, an outright meeting ban simply moves the
problem elsewhere.

Rogelberg advocates reform, rather than removal. “The goal isn’t to eliminate meetings, it’s
to eliminate the bad ones.” He suggests clustering calls together, so workers have concrete
blocks of time to find flow. “By shrinking meeting size and duration, you can give workers
back their time. You need to do the hard stuff – changing meetings and the ecosystem in
which they sit so they’re more effective. Just banning them on an afternoon isn’t enough.”

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