Is Meetings Overload Sabotaging Your Organisation? (2022)

No one can deny that since the pandemic and the rise of remote and hybrid working practices, the use of technology to communicate has risen exponentially.  There is no doubt that the rise in the number of meetings in our calendars is overwhelming individuals, teams, and organisations and even more frighteningly, it appears to be one of those wicked problems that seem too big and complex to break down. 

The rise in meetings can be due to a lack of proximity to our colleagues when working in hybrid or remote teams and organisations, which is stifling organisations into a stalemate of bureaucratic meeting overload.

If this phenomenon is new to your organisation or company, it may be a reaction to a necessity – the pandemic, which unfortunately has not dissipated with the resumption of ‘near normal’ practice.

Thinking about your organisation or company – has it made a genuine commitment to transform the way business is conducted or simply just increased the number of meetings in a reactionary manner?

As a result, where you would think that collaboration and processes have become more efficient, the fact is that the reverse has happened.

Alongside the business impact, we cannot ignore the human impact of this either, or if we do, we do so at our peril, because as a mode of operating, it is unsustainable. 

It appears to be an increasing problem that employees are suffering from overload or in danger of burnout due to back-to-back meetings in diaries with no sign of dissipation.  Back-to-back meetings leave employees with screen fatigue, physical musculoskeletal issues, no headspace for deep individual work, little job satisfaction, and a lack of continued personal development and career progression.

Even the most important meetings are increasingly becoming ineffective because attendees are often multi-tasking and catching up with emails and other work in the background, so essentially, the quality of the meeting, its decisions, and productivity are affected.  Frighteningly being ignored, is the fact that most meetings yield little or no value, when an email, instant message or telephone call would have sufficed.

The Issues with Zoom and MS Teams

There is little doubt that remote and hybrid working has a multitude of benefits to organisations and individuals; ranging from reduced overheads to better work-life balance, although work-life balance is another topic all together, for now, let’s go with the theory that work-life balance is better.

Joe Allen, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Utah, director for the Center for Meeting Effectiveness, and co-author of Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work. “Neuroscience confirms that humans need time to cognitively switch gears.”

“Taking frequent breaks allows time for the brain to go idle, which increases the possibility that insights will occur.”

A soon-to-be-released academic study included in the book found that individuals need at least five minutes of recovery time after a good meeting and 17 minutes after a bad one. Long meetings should also be broken into parts. “For meetings that are longer than one hour, take breaks every hour”

Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab measured the brain activity of 14 individuals and found that:

1.     For those “with breaks” between meetings – their brains were steady and experienced “coolness.”

2.     For those “without breaks” between meetings – their stress increased with time, suggesting a “build-up of stress.”

You can read further here: Research Proves Your Brain Needs Breaks (microsoft.com).

Microsoft concluded:

1.       Shift your mindset – viewing breaks away from the computer as an essential part of your workday.

2.     Finding break activities that calm your mind – a short meditation is an effective way to relax and recharge between meetings.

3.     Create breaks by considering other forms of communication – this is asking yourself “do we need a meeting?” Using other forms of communication like Channels in teams, email, or telephone.

4.     Making meeting more intentional – create and send agendas ahead of time, being thoughtful about who needs to be at the meeting, starting and stopping on time, and transitioning to a recap for the final five minutes.

So, what can organisations do, to start to turn this around? It may include some of the following:

1.       A review of meetings from a top-down and bottom-up perspective: organisation, team/service, individual and vice versa.

2.     Agreement on a set of mindsets, and practices to prioritise meetings’ best practices.  These might be, ensuring meetings start and end at the times specified, asking attendees to be fully present, all papers are read and responses prepared by attendees in advance.

3.     Agreement across teams/services and the organisation around times meeting start and end and perhaps setting in some exclusion zones where no meetings are scheduled.

4.     More and more companies are establishing meeting free days - establish a meeting-free day - a single day of the work week where meetings are prohibited. You may think that people just schedule the meetings on other days of the week. Apparently not, at least according to data collected by David Rubinger, a data scientist at Polar.  When people see how much they’re able to accomplish in a day without meetings, they’ll crave that productivity throughout the rest of the week. They may be less inclined to schedule meetings on other days of the week, and they may learn how to get the information they need without relying on meetings.

What is evident here is, that the research cannot be ignored by individuals and more importantly organisations.