Bad Meetings and Productivity

Working with many large corporations and their development teams, it has become clear that the changes in meeting frequency and structure have had a significant impact on productivity. Bad meetings and their impact on the productivity are a key impediment to achieving the overall organizational goals. The refrain from many individual contributors, “I’m in back to back meetings today” reflects this productivity impact. The question becomes, when do these individual contributors have time to do their assigned tasks?

Why More Bad Meetings?

There are a number of reasons for the rise of bad meetings, and their impact on productivity , but the following types seem to be the primary contributors.

Reason	Cause
Meetings to Address Communication Gaps	the organizational information flow is not working, and this type of bad meeting becomes an available tool to improve the information flow. The organization uses this type of bad meeting to address the gaps in the information flow to leadership as well as the individual contributors
Meeting as a Commitment Device	This bad meetings tracks the progress on key projects. Program managers and leaders use this type of bad meetings to track progress and extract commitment from the individuals, with all individuals gathered to report on progress one by one.
Social Participation	As a result of the increasingly remote workplace behaviors, these bad meetings may substitute for onsite interactions.

Meeting Types

The Impact of Bad Meetings on Productivity

These meetings have attributes that are at odds with the goal of meeting productivity, specifically

Large Participation – each of these bad meeting types usually involves a large number of participants. Meetings with fewer than 8 people have been shown to be the most productive meetings, and these bad meeting types usually far exceed that threshold (The Most Productive Meetings Have Fewer Than 8 People ).
Limited Engagement – these meeting have low engagement by the participants. Communications and commitments often involve “one at a time” communication, with most of the people listening. Multitasking by the participants during bad meetings becomes the rule.
Lack of Clear Outcomes – communication and commitment meetings don’t focus on a single, clear outcome, replacing the meeting with a general “well we have covered all the topics”.

In addition, bad meetings have significant impacts on the participants, specifically “meeting overload”. Meeting overload leads to decreased morale, burnout, and reduced time for execution. In many cases, people disrupt their work-life balance, stretching their day to find time to deal with assigned tasks, rather than being productive during normal work hours.

Solutions to the Bad Meeting Problem

Fortunately, there are any number of tools and behaviors available to addressing the key types of bad meetings that kill productivity

Communications Meeting

The pandemic saw the rise of any number of collaboration tools (Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc.) that facilitate online communications. These tools feature any number of collaborations mechanisms (team chats, posts, file sharing) that provide for communicating status. Unfortunately many organizations have not fully embraced the capabilities of these tools, using them as little more than file shares. A concentrated effort to have the organization embrace collaboration can make people continually aware of what’s happening and eliminate the need for these communication meetings.

Commitment Meeting

Again, the post pandemic world includes the a number of collaborative project tools. Slack and Microsoft Teams include task management plugins, and online tools such as SmartSheet can drive monitoring and commitments. Program management should move from an overall project team tracking meetings to smaller, more effective commitment meetings with the sub teams, and a limited participation reporting meeting. Communication of commitments to leadership comes through the tool, not the meeting.

Social Participation

A simple mechanism of using the camera during online meetings and chats can significantly improve the social participation. The team chats using the collaboration tools also allows more participation between the team.

Meetings Discipline

The best solution to the impact of meetings on productivity is the commitment to meeting discipline. Following these rules can significantly improve the effectiveness of meetings

Monitor your meetings– There is an old saying, “if you measure it, it will get better”. Monitoring meetings by type, size and frequency can help the organization understand the impact of productivity killing meetings. A smart organization assigns this key activity to someone and leadership formally monitors the results.
Set aside “Meeting Blackout” periods – set aside times where dedicated work can take place. Making the concept of meeting blackout periods work requires the organizational discipline to avoid crashing the blackout periods.
Enforce Meeting Structure – limiting meetings to 8 or less individuals, requiring agendas and meeting minutes, making the meeting more productivity and effectively communicating the meeting outcomes

Summary

Bad meetings result from an organization applying old ways of working in the new world. When collaboration tools didn’t exist, project tracking and general communications centered on the use of meetings. But now, organizations can embrace new tools and allow these tools to address tasking and communication. This frees up valuable time to focus upon deliverables, enhancing productivity.

Achieving consensus and determining course of action relies upon meetings. By following the guidance outlined here an organization can find time for these important meeting and give the organization back the time to implement the actions. Meeting discipline yields fewer, better and quicker meetings, eliminating the productivity drains of meetings that can be better served by collaboration tools.