You’re not imagining it, we're all having too many meetings.
The average knowledge worker spends 23 hours a week in meetings. Since shifting to remote and hybrid working, meetings have steadily increased in duration and frequency, with people attending 13 percent more meetings than they were before. A growing body of research is reporting that spending the majority of your workday in meetings negatively affects psychological, physical, and mental well-being.
Even before the pandemic, managers thought meetings were often a poor use of people’s time. In 2017, Harvard Business School surveyed 182 senior managers across multiple industries and found:
· 71% said meetings were unproductive and inefficient
· 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work
· 64% said team meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
· 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring their teams closer together
Many organizations are adopting no-meeting days
One obvious solution, popular with big companies including Facebook, Asana, and Atlassian, is to ban meetings one or more days a week. It’s a common-sense tactic and has been pushed by productivity gurus for years, well before the remote work revolution.
The question is, do no-meeting days work? Do they actually have a positive impact on productivity and well-being? Or simply lead to overscheduling on the designated meeting days.