Use These Five Hacks To Rein In Meeting Madness

• Research indicates a consistent annual increase in the number of meetings since 2000, with many deemed unnecessary and unproductive, often lacking a clear agenda.
• The pandemic significantly intensified the frequency of meetings, emphasizing their role in maintaining organizational cohesion and structure, yet potentially highlighting systemic inefficiencies.
• Recommendations inspired by Peter Drucker’s philosophy include aligning meetings with strategy execution, enforcing brevity, focusing on customer perspectives, setting time limits, and ensuring actionable outcomes to combat the excessive meeting culture.

The late management guru Peter Drucker was an opinionated prognosticator. He often weighed in on management topics in rather blunt ways, infuriating his critics. When it comes to his opinions on the value of meetings, he did not disappoint.

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization,” he suggested. “The fewer of them, the better.”

Drucker was not the only management thinker to worry about meetings. Over the past couple of decades a considerable amount of research has been conducted on the frequency and effectiveness of corporate meetings, and the results are alarming.

While the pandemic has amped up the number and futility of meetings considerably, the frequency of meetings has been on the rise for decades.

By the Numbers

Since 2000, the number of meetings has increased between 8-10% per year. A 2017 Harvard Business Review article suggests that executives spent around 23 hours per week in meetings in 2017, up from around 10 hours in the 1960s. 

Other research shows that roughly 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings, while around 50% of those meetings are deemed unnecessary. And only 17% of executives believe meetings are productive. Why? Because 63% of meetings don’t have a set agenda, and a full 37% don’t have an agenda at all.

And Then the Pandemic

When the world went into lockdown during the pandemic, meetings exploded in frequency and importance. NPR reports on research from Microsoft suggesting that the amount of time people spend in meetings has tripled since the onset of the pandemic.

Collectively, some suggest that the overall effect of our culture of meetings is monumentally wasteful:

• There are 55 million meetings per week in the U.S.
• The average worker spends 3 hours per day in meetings
• 83% of employees spend about one third of their work week in meetings
• This represents $24B of lost productive time annually

The Pandemic and Meetings’ New Importance

If Peter Drucker was correct, and instinctively many people feel that he was right at least about this, then the pandemic has introduced yet another level of “bad organization.” Of course there have to be some meetings in any organization, to coordinate the basic activities of the firm. I am not suggesting otherwise. 

However, during the pandemic, precisely because people were physically separated from one another, holding meetings took on a new significance. Aside from the individual projects underway and the individual tasks that drive projects to completion, meetings became a way of affirming that:

• Organizations exist
• People still had jobs
• Culture could be maintained
• Managers could know that people were available and still committed
• “Things were on track”

But now that workers can go back to the office to work side by side with teammates and collaborate informally, our meeting culture needs to be revisited.

Anecdotally, we hear stories of workers whose bosses require them to be at the office, then once they get there they spend time in empty offices on Zoom with teammates who are working from home. Again, these meetings help reaffirm that “we are all in this together,” but they do little to prioritize the real work that needs to get done. As Drucker would put it, this is a sign of bad organization.

Five Fixes, Inspired by Drucker

There are five things that teams can do to reign in the meeting madness. Not all meetings are bad and unnecessary, but it’s still key to make a shift in thinking about why and how to have meetings.

1.Strategy Execution Above All Else

Before meetings are scheduled, organizers should be able to clearly articulate how the meeting helps support or drive the company’s core business strategy. 

Research by Paul Zak (and reported in Harvard Business Review) suggests that only around 40% of those in his survey were fully aware of what the company’s main strategy is. This being the case, it makes sense to tie meetings to strategy, perhaps even by writing the strategy “on the board” physically or virtually before every meeting. This way at least people would be reminded of what the strategy is.

2.No Chairs

Different from daily “standup meetings” that quickly provide updates on progress and challenges on specific project topics, maybe it is time for there to be no chairs in most (though not all) meeting rooms. 

The more comfortable people are in meetings, the longer they will likely last. Start with the strategy, present the meeting agenda, knock it out, and then get back to work (recall that 37% of meetings don’t have an agenda at all).

3.One Seat Only

Distinguishing between “chairs” and “seats,” provide a space (or seat) at the table for your customers. Amazon does this as a way to remind those in the meeting that everything should start with the customer (on which company strategy depends in the first place), and that everything reverts starts there. 

This brings to mind another Peter Drucker adage, when he said that because the purpose of a business is to create a customer, it has only two primary functions: innovation and marketing.

4.Short and Sweet

Like standup meetings, companies need to put a limit on the length of meetings. Maybe a half hour, tops. Research shows that while the average meeting is 31-60 minutes long, the average human attention span is between 10-18 minutes. Meetings need to be tightened up. Maybe a 30-minutes-max rule really is the right tactic.

5.Tied to Tangible Action

How often are you in a meeting where the summary is an agreement that the group needs to…meet again. This is where “meetings become working,” and where recurring meetings get institutionalized as dead weight. Thus, make sure that the outcome of every meeting leads to some direct action taken by someone. 

That sounds vague and not so convincing, but that is where we are. Too often, in our current culture of meeting, we get accustomed to going in, sitting and trying to stay awake, with no action taken other than to plan the next meeting. 

And on and on we go.

Adapting to the Hybrid Era

The pandemic and the current hybrid era has seemingly elevated the need for more meetings. During the peak of the pandemic when most people were working from home, there was some logic to this. Today, however, as employees acclimate to being in the office 2-3 days a week, perhaps it is time to reel it in on the meetings.

A whole consulting industry on managing time effectively and how to run meetings has been around for a while. Organizational inertia and the unwritten “logic” of company culture often subvert the advice of these thoughtful consultants. It might be time for organizations to start listening to them and taking them seriously. 

If we can get some of that time back, maybe the “productivity crisis” that some managers love to complain about can be addressed.