At a recent meeting, Shannon Bender and Keith Martine tried something new: they stood the whole time.
The two founders of Apostrophe, a New York City start-up focused on expanding access to the arts, knew their encounters were long overdue. It didn’t seem to matter who they talked to – artists, investors or employees – many meetings lasted two hours.
“Sometimes it’s intentional because we’re building relationships, but other times it’s not,” said Mr Martine.
“We have one team member who definitely likes to talk a lot,” Ms Bender added with a laugh. “Meetings with him are not efficient at all.”
All that time in meetings left little time to work. At Apostrophe, this meant less time for establishing contacts with artists and buyers and putting together art shows.
According to Zippia, a site that provides job seekers with information about a company’s culture, American workers spend an average of 31 hours a month in meetings they consider unproductive.
Mrs. Bender and Mr. Martine knew the problem. For them, meetings of any kind – with a potential hire or a long-term employee – often took a long time. What they needed was a solution.
So when they interviewed a candidate to become their new assistant, they didn’t offer her a seat, but asked if she was open to a standing conversation. After that, they skipped small talk and dived straight into her work history, aspirations, strengths and weaknesses, and views on the art industry.
“After 20 minutes, we got 100 percent what we needed,” Ms. Bender said. “The conversation was so efficient I almost felt bad it was so short.” They hired her and it was such a positive experience – even though Ms. Bender and the interviewee were close behind – that Apostrophe will encourage standing meetings from now on. (Indeed, at their next staff meeting, everyone stood up.)
Meetings are a source of stress for both employees and managers.
“Meetings in themselves don’t cause problems,” says Steven G. Rogelberg, a professor of management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “They weren’t made with a sadistic mindset.”
A new office culture
The past few years have radically changed the way we work.
Their premise – that a leader wants more people to be informed or involved in decision making – can help employees feel involved. Meetings raise more voices, and being invited can feel like an honor, Mr. Rogelberg said.
“Bad meetings are the root of the problems,” he explained. “If meetings are poorly run and have too many participants and take too long and don’t have a clear purpose, that’s problematic.”
It’s also a problem when people have too much and can’t do their job. In a 2022 study, Mr. Rogelberg found that office workers spent an average of about 18 hours per week in meetings, which amounted to about $25,000 per year in labor costs per employee. He also found that employees felt they didn’t need to attend 30 percent of the meetings they were invited to.
Remote work during the pandemic, removing the chance of impromptu discussions, led to encounters of creeps. A March last year Microsoft report found that the number of meetings per week worldwide had increased by 153 percent since the start of the pandemic.
Many companies are trying to address the problem by finding creative ways to make meetings, both in-person and virtual, not only more efficient, but also more scarce.
Sarah Kellogg Neff, the CEO of the Lactation Network, a 65-person company that connects new moms to breastfeeding resources and is the nation’s largest network of board-certified lactation consultants, wants her employees to feel like they have control over their working days.
“We have a culture of high trust and high autonomy,” she said. “This is what top performers want.”
Therefore, it is company policy that employees can unsubscribe from meetings regardless of who invited them. (Even their boss or the boss’s boss!)
“When they get an invite to a meeting, anyone can say, ‘What’s my role here?’ Or, ‘Hey, I’m busy with something else, is it okay if I check out of the meeting?’” Ms. Neff said.
People sometimes cancel her, but she doesn’t feel offended. “In a weird way, it makes me proud,” she said.
Sam Kaser, 30, who lives in Chicago and works on the Lactation Network’s patient care team, said she regularly exercises this right, especially when a regular check-in for a long-term project is beyond her purview that week.
She’s had more meetings at this company than in any previous job, she said, but isn’t as frustrated with attending. “I’m 100 percent sure why I should be in that ‘room,'” she said.
Many companies, including the Lactation Network, are experimenting with meeting-free days.
Studies show that this type of intervention can work. A study published in the MIT Sloan Management Review found that when companies implemented no meeting days one day a week, autonomy, communication, engagement and satisfaction improved.
In a Microsoft survey of 435 of its employees, 73 percent said not having meetings on Friday was good for their well-being and 77 percent said it was good for their focus time.
Canva, a maker of design software, has 3,500 employees in eight offices around the world. If someone tries to schedule a meeting on Wednesday, the day the company doesn’t have a meeting, they’ll automatically be declined “with a note saying we’re trying to adopt this mental health and productivity policy,” says Jennie Rogerson, Canva’s global head of people, which is based in Sydney, Australia.
The company cherishes this policy so much – “I use Wednesdays to go through my emails,” Ms Rogerson said, adding that “there’s nothing better than inbox zero” – it’s experimenting with whole weeks, called focus weeks, when not -essential meetings have been cancelled.
It’s not easy to do something like that, said Ms. Rogerson. For example, employees are in different time zones.
“No meetings on Wednesday means another day Australia and the US cannot meet, and with the time zone shift, the number of hours people can meet is already at a minimum,” she said. “We’re trying to think about this.”
Another problem is that other working days can be busier than they would otherwise be. “You know when you’re playing a game of Tetris and things get wild?” asked Mrs. Rogerson. “This is what my schedule looks like, with the exception of Wednesday with no meeting.”
In early 2023, Shopify, the global commerce company, reinstated the meeting-free Wednesday, which it had tried in the past, and the number of meetings that day fell by 44 percent.
To free up more time, Shopify also automatically removed recurring meetings with three or more people and asked people to postpone rescheduling for two weeks (a cooldown period) so they could think about what to add. company also created a specific time slot in which company-wide meetings could be held.
Jacques Krzepkowski, 39, a staff product designer for Shopify in Calgary, Alberta, said he will spend 18 hours a week in meetings by 2022. Now his average week has eight hours of meetings.
“The one-on-one conversations are easier to cluster, so I have bigger blocks of free time to complete in-depth work,” he said.
Ms. Neff, from the Lactation Network, warned that cutting out large group gatherings could leave some employees feeling left out. Although her company is trying to cut back on meetings, anyone who wants to can still participate.
“We have a very open door policy,” she said. “If you see a topic you’re interested in or a meeting you’re interested in, you can attend, but otherwise we respect your time.”
Mr. Rogelberg, who also works as a consultant, said he had clients who made meetings more efficient by rewriting agendas as questions to answer rather than topics to discuss.
“When you do that, you really have to think about why you’re coming together,” he said. “If there’s no question to answer, you don’t need a meeting.”
This also helps determine who should be there, he said, because only the people essential to answering the questions should be included.
The problem with all of these techniques—Mondays without meetings, standing staff meetings, focus weeks without meetings—is that even the most averse to meetings can find it hard to enforce them.
“These days or half days without meetings can have some success, but it takes a very strong collective commitment,” said Mr Rogelberg. “We have data suggesting that people schedule meetings during those meeting-free periods because they know everyone is available.”
