In October 2020 Dropbox announced that it would become a “Virtual First” company. Its guide for employees sets a rule for meetings: “We save meetings for the 3d’s (discussion, debate, and decision-making).” “Everything else we handle over chat, email, or a doc.”
The guide adds: “We care about your impact—not how many meetings you’re in.”
In 2014 Michael Mankins of the consulting firm Bain & Company described one large company where “people there spent 300,000 hours a year just supporting the weekly executive committee meeting.”
For decades, American articles said that 11 million meetings take place every day in the United States. The figure is usually traced to the 1976 book How to Make Meetings Work! by Michael Doyle and David Strauss. They gave no source for it. Elise Keith of the software company Lucid Meetings calls the number apocryphal.
In 2015 Lucid made its own estimate and “arrived at a conservatively updated number of 55 million meetings per day.” Its update in 2022 gives 62 to 80 million meetings a day in the United States.
“At Asana, we have a rule: no meetings on Wednesdays.” The goal is that “everyone gets a large block of time each week to do focused, heads-down work.” Asana says it wants the rule to be “very (but not 100%) consistent.”
In early 2022 Asana tried a “meeting doomsday” with one of its teams. The team members were asked to “delete all their recurring meetings from their calendars” and “sit with their newly cleansed calendars for 48 hours.” Then they put back only the meetings they needed. Participants saved an average of 11 hours a month.
Ken Segall worked for years as a creative director on Apple’s advertising. In his 2012 book Insanely Simple, he describes a weekly meeting with the agency. Steve Jobs noticed someone he did not recognize and asked, “Who are you?” She explained her role. Jobs said: “I don’t think we need you in this meeting, Lorrie. Thanks.”
A reviewer of the book drew the lesson: it is easier to let an extra person stay in a meeting than to ask that person to leave.
Microsoft’s Work Trend Index for 2023, based on 31,000 workers in 31 markets, reported that “since February 2020, people are in 3x more Teams meetings and calls per week.” In the same report, “People report that the number one productivity disruptor is inefficient meetings.” Too many meetings came third.
Microsoft summed it up in one line: “sitting in one-hour meetings for one-minute insights.”
In the July–August 2017 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun reported that executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.
In their survey of 182 senior managers, “71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient.” “65% said meetings keep them from completing their own work.” “64% said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.”
In April 2018 Elon Musk sent an email to Tesla employees with advice on productivity. It began with meetings. “Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time.” He asked them to get rid of large meetings unless they were providing value to the whole audience, “in which case keep them very short.”
“Also get rid of frequent meetings, unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter.” And: “Walk out of a meeting or drop off a call as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value. It is not rude to leave, it is rude to make someone stay and waste their time.”
This meeting could have been an email. Americans say it after a meeting that wasted their time.
In 2019 the scheduling company Doodle estimated that pointless meetings would cost organizations in the United States about $400 billion that year. The figure is the company’s own estimate, based on more than 19 million meetings in four countries.
One way to get a sense for the importance of short lines of communications within an American team is to observe those lines. Team meetings: How often are they scheduled? How long do they last? Who takes part in them? What topics are addressed? How much detail do they go into?
Team or staff meetings play an important role in American teams. They help management and the team maintain an overview of their most important work. Information flow is supported. Current developments, problems, complexities can be addressed immediately. If well run, staff meetings can be motivating. Management remains „in touch“ with the team.
Frequent meetings are standard practice in the American business culture. According to the National Statistics Council, 37% of managers and white collar worker time is spent in meetings. Other data indicate there are 11 million business meetings every day or roughly 3 billion meetings per year. According to a Verizon study, „Busy professionals attend over 60 meetings each month. However, most say they cannot attend all meetings to which they are invited due to the tremendous demands on their time.“
The Verizon study found that “different meeting types were characterized by different patterns of meeting purposes. On average, in-person meetings are more likely to be sales-related, video conferences are more likely to be centered around updates and information-sharing, and audio conferences tend to consist of updates, brainstorming, and strategy development.”
According to a study done by the University of Tulsa and the University of Arizona, about 25 percent of American business meetings were between 31 and 61 minutes long. “The average time participants spend to prepare for, travel to, and attend an in-person meeting involving five people is 53 hours and 24 minutes. This is more than three times the time involved in an audio or video conference meeting.”
When meetings are required somebody must decide who should be invited and who should be excluded. One researcher found that “not having the ‘right’ people is one of the leading causes of unproductive meetings.” More than a third (34%) of 3M Study participants report only some (30%) relevant people attended meetings.
A common complaint from American businesspeople is that key decision makers are not present at meetings. Therefore, much time is wasted discussing topics that no one at the table has the authority to make decisions about.
However, another study encourages meeting planners to exclude senior-level leadership if at all possible. “Avoid and resist senior managers and directors attending your meetings unless you can be sure that their presence will be positive, and certainly not intimidating. Senior people are often quick to criticize and pressurize without knowing the facts, which can damage team relationships, morale, motivation and trust.”