Can We End Unnecessary Meetings?
5 strategies (and top startups) to help us end unnecessary meetings.
“Never mistake activity for achievement.” –John Wooden
More and More Meetings
We have all been there. We know what a boring and unnecessary meeting feels like. We start multitasking. We doodle in our notebooks. We watch the clock. We can’t wait for the meeting to end so we can get back to our real work.
Unfortunately, meetings are consuming more and more of our time. According to Bain Consulting, time spent in meetings has grown 8-10% annually since 2000 and there are now 25M+ meetings per day in the US. One survey found that 46% of employed Americans would rather do anything unpleasant like stand in line at the DMV or watch paint dry than sit through another meeting of status updates.
One would think that we must be having more meetings because they are driving productivity. Nope. According to a survey by The Muse, executives consider more than 67% of meetings to be failures. Even more damaging, another study found that dysfunctional meetings are correlated with lower levels of market share, innovation, and employment stability.
What is driving the onslaught of meetings? It’s simple: people like to feel productive and a natural way to feel productive is to be busy. The easiest way to fill up the calendar? Meetings! It gets worse when working remotely. Managers over schedule virtual meetings in lieu of face-to-face time in the office. According to research by Asana, on average, workers experienced 157 hours of extra meetings in 2020. These unnecessary meetings try to recreate watercooler talk, happy hours and culture-building experiences. Meetings are piling up and workers are burning out: 71% of workers experienced burnout in 2020.
When we add it all up, meetings cost $1.4T per year in the US, or 7% of GDP. How do we make sure our energy, time and opportunity cost aren’t being wasted? It’s time to use modern software to improve meetings before we all burnout!
What Can We Do About This?
The solution is not to get rid of meetings. If you have had to tried to have a deep or nuanced conversation over Slack, you know that synchronous meetings are immensely valuable for high-bandwidth collaboration. The goal is to end unnecessary meetings and make the necessary meetings more productive and joyous.
From speaking with hundreds of founders, executives and researching best practices, here are five actionable ways to end unnecessary meetings while improving necessary meetings:
1. Push the Boundaries of Asynchronous Communication
Everyone in the US intimately knows what Zoom fatigue feels like. Instead of getting 20 people on a Zoom to provide a status update or go through capacity planning, asynchronous communication can often accomplish objectives without the same time requirements and coordination headaches.
Gitlab and Zapier, both fully remote companies, have written extensively about when and how to conduct asynchronous communication (see here and here, respectively). When needing to build trust, rapport or have high-bandwidth discussion, synchronous is preferred. However, intentional asynchronous communication is more powerful than people give it credit for.
Suggested applications to support asynchronous communication:
Collaborative Documents: Google Docs, Dropbox Paper, Notion
Check-ins: Range
Texting: Slack
Recorded videos: Loom
2. Adopt Less-Invasive Video Communication
Today’s widely used video conferencing applications — Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangout — all feel performative. You are looking at a grid of faces while trying to evaluate how you look in your video screen. Research is finding that gallery view challenges the brain’s central vision, forcing it to decode too much at once that no one comes through meaningfully, not even the speaker. After a day of video conferences, we are left feeling depleted and disconnected.
Emerging startups are reimaging the video collaboration experience from the ground-up. Around uses circular floating heads instead of a grid mode. It offers fun filters, emojis and GIFs so users can focus less on how they look and more on their work. Around empowers collaboration by floating above a document or application rather than taking up the full screen.
Suggested video-based collaboration applications:
3. End Meeting FOMO by Sharing Notes
A driving force for the increase in meetings is meeting FOMO. Workers don’t like feeling left out and to quote Hamilton, they want to be in the room where it happens. Thus, meetings grow in size. When meetings grow in size, more smaller break-out and follow-up meetings are required to reach agreement. This triggers a spiral of more meetings.
A great way to end meeting FOMO is to distribute written or video-based meeting summaries. This allows some attendees to skip the meeting, but not be left out. Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing are automating meeting transcription. Companies like Gong and Otter.ai generate sharable meeting summaries and analytics. Better use of sharable meeting summaries can help reduce meeting fatigue.
Suggested applications to end meeting FOMO:
Sales meeting summaries: Gong
Video-bases summaries: Grain
Meeting transcription: Otter.ai
Meeting Co-Pilots: Miter
4. Use Live Data to Limit Follow Ups
Research finds that a major cause of unnecessary meeting proliferation is stale or inadequate data. When workers can’t access necessary data during a meeting, they are stymied from making a decision. Instead, they have to schedule another meeting with the added homework of assembling the correct data. The most efficient teams now conduct meetings with modern BI tools, plugging directly in to live data and high-fidelity artifacts rather than relying on stale PowerPoint slides.
Suggested applications to pull in live data:
Presentations: Pitch
There are too many data-rich applications and interfaces to list as they vary by job function, but others include Airtable, Amplitude, Metabase, Noteable, Looker and ThoughtSpot
5. The Before & After: Agendas + Retrospectives
A quick win to improve meeting culture is to set an agenda that is circulated in advance. Research finds that setting an agenda can reduce meeting time by up to 80%. Only ~37% of meetings have an agenda so there is much room for improvement. In addition to pre-meeting agendas, post-meeting retrospectives have been shown to significantly improve the quality of meetings. According to Harvard research, collecting data from meeting participants and discussing it openly is the best way to understand how much resentment is building up under the surface and how much work is actually getting displaced from meetings. The key is to not create too much busy work before and after meetings so meeting software needs to be integrated into existing workflows and behaviors.
Suggested tools for agendas and retrospectives:
Closing Thoughts
Managing successful meetings is critical. The risk is more meetings. The goal is fewer, more impactful meetings. Managers risk churning their employees with bad meetings. A UNC study found that how employees feel about the effectiveness of their company’s meeting correlates strongly with overall job satisfaction. Employees are burning out while losing interest with waning productivity. The good news is that we have emerging technologies to rescue us from bad meetings. We just need to do a better job of using them and implementing good habits. I am encouraged by the number of startups driving innovation in meeting culture to make us more productive and happier at work. The future of meetings is digital, data-driven, inclusive and asynchronous with rich collaboration surfaces.
If you are building a company in this space, I would love to hear from you at zach@wing.vc or @zacharydewitt on Twitter.
Thank you to founders Keith Peiris, Daniel Pupius, Ben Finkel, Jordan Husney, Damian Wisniewski and Dave Feldman for reading a draft of this post.
Extra Credit Reading:
WSJ: Who Gets the Conference Room?
Simply Replicating the In-Office Experience Remotely Doesn't Work, Inc.