Here at Canary Towers we love a good bit of research. Surveys we commissioned via Censuswide were so supportive of our goal of ‘Making Meetings Better’ they looked borderline suspicious!
It was therefore with great pleasure that I read an article in The New Statesman (the UK’s left-leaning mag that counts the likes of John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf and Christopher Hitchens as past contributors, no less) reporting the death of meetings.
Quoting the work of Prof Vijay Pereira from the NEOMA Business School in France, it even went so far as to suggest that meetings held in actual rooms resulted in elevated CO2 levels which would: 1, affect your brain function and 2, ultimately lead to premature death.
However, ignoring for a second that somewhat dystopian world view, the research they were quoting from was a remarkable attempt to dispel the corporate myth that mass meetings are anything other than a massive waste of everyone’s time.
The researchers at NEOMA persuaded 76 companies, each of whom employed between 1,000 and 100,000 employees and worked in 50 or more countries, to take part in their study by switching to at least one meeting-free day (in which even one-to-one meetings were entirely ruled out) per week.
Over two years, from 2019 to 2021 – during which time, the world’s offices switched to online meetings anyway – they surveyed more than 25,000 employees on what changed when meetings were restricted. They gathered both quantitative data (on how the companies performed) and qualitative data (how employees felt about their work), interviewing executives and HR managers. Some companies stuck to one meeting-free day, others (7%) went for the full five, but across the board the change improved every metric they measured.
These stunning finds did turn up a few last-millennium dinocrats (I just made the word up but hope it gains in currency), with managers at one multinational doing what managers do: they called a meeting. Then another. Then another, and another, and another.
‘They actually had 17 recorded meetings, at an average of two hours… 34 hours of their lives, they spent to decide whether they were to opt in!’ said Prof Pereira.
Eventually, perhaps as the New Statesmen observed ‘the people opposing the motion just died?’ the company decided to opt in to two days per week in which no one in the company would have any meetings at all. And like most of the 76 multinational companies in Pereira’s two-year experiment, they found that it worked. They didn’t need to have as many meetings. Most companies, on most days, didn’t need to have meetings at all.
Meetings used to serve a sensible purpose. In a more analogue world, getting humans into a room, with a clear agenda, and a suggested direction or imagined output, meant people could do what people do best and solve problems collaboratively. Since digital came along – and the requirement, then the expectation, of working from home, meetings have become a burden, the consequences on productivity seemingly ignored and the worshiping at the altar of irrelevance has become a daily grind for most of us.
Oftentimes it seems that meetings benefit only one person, the organiser. The New Statesmen suggested that ‘it’s a performance – one that cements the social hierarchy of the company and the authority of its managers’. One telling point from Pereira’s data is that the people who demanded the most meetings were younger or newly-promoted managers – especially men – who were ‘keen to be visible, but also to send a signal that they were in control’.
Oh dear.
This control is expensive. If a manager uses a two-hour meeting with 18 colleagues to make some decisions, they’re spending person-hours equivalent to one person doing an entire week’s work. I’ve attended ‘all hands’ meetings with literally thousands of colleagues sometimes for as long as two hours. Doing the maths on that is terrifying if 5,000 attend for the full two hours. That’s an extraordinary over five years of work for one person. Utter insanity.
By adopting the research conclusions not only do you stop this madness but you reduce micromanaging and stress, while communication actually improves, people enjoy work again, productivity increases and the world is a better place!
Pereira is clear that this doesn’t mean all meetings are pointless. The meeting is as least as old as work itself, and for employees it serves a human as well as a corporate purpose. ‘By default, human beings are socially bound – they want to meet, they want to speak’, he told The New Statesman. But as the world returned to the office, he sees an opportunity for companies to take a more rational approach to people’s time – including working four days a week, which he says also leads to higher productivity.
The greatest challenge major economies face is one of productivity declines. This will be the subject of a later blog – but if you take data showing how many hours are worked on average in an economy and take the GDP of that economy and you divide the two, you will get the amount of money earned on average per hour per person. By that measure, the UK and US rank 14th and 10th in the world respectively, out produced by the Dutch, the Irish and the Scandinavians.
Now I’m not saying that all this is because of wasting time in meetings. But given the hundreds of hours wasted in pointless meetings, it seems very likely that if this waste reduces, then people are given productive time back that they can transform into productivity gains. And you can only manage what you can measure – and Meeting Canary measures the whole nine yards and shows you how to make better, more efficient use of meeting time.
HC