According to Microsoft, people have 250% more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic, a statistic that makes sense and deeply sucks. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic nails the evaluation of the statistic: “People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,” says Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft. “That means everything else—like coding and email and writing—is being pushed later.” Workday creep and meeting creep aren’t two separate trends; they’re the same trend.
I have a lot of battle-hardened thoughts on this - because I have a chronically-ill spouse, so I was largely WFH for years before the pandemic. I got *very* used to making work from home work. When we saw the pandemic coming in February 2020, I was the guy charged with getting departments to cooperate to make full company WFH feasible - and we made it, and it worked great.
My job title is Senior System Administrator. That means I'm at a level where half my job is esoteric beep-boop computer touching, but the other half - and I do mean 50% or so - is internal public relations. I write emails that are functionally press releases to three or four people.
I join half-hour meetings that should have been emails - because it is 100% more likely the other person will do the damn thing you are asking them than if you sent it as an email, rather than an action list item after a half-hour meeting.
The thing about WFH when others are in the office is that you *absolutely* have to work your arse off to be visible as present.
When you're all WFH, it can be super annoying. I complained to my boss's boss that being expected to be an on-call Twitch streamer in a professional context was utterly draining. I can do it, but I really do not like it.
On the other hand ... I find we really do need those meetings.
The main thing is to have the meetings clearly set out, with purposes and agendas (as meetings should always have) and as far as possible well in advance. Regular meetings must be regular too, not randomly skipped so you don't get yourself worked up into meeting mode for nothing.
We have also onboarded new techies. They need meetings - the meaningful sort, I mean - to get up to speed! I can't see a way around this.
Mostly I suspect the secret is not letting meetings become in any way ad-hoc. NO MULCH. And my afternoons are usually clear for actual work and thought.
I don't find the 250% figure outlandish. But we've learnt to wield ours reasonably well, after a shaky start .
That said, I'm at a company that's very firm about working hours - when you're done for the day, you are *done* - work/life balance and your family comes first. A relative was ill recently and I was on hospital support duty for three weeks, trying and mostly failing to work on NHS wifi. Meetings were not a thing that was going to happen.
And even with that, we made a *bundle* of cash in 2020 and 2021, and are firmly established that WFH is the way we're going forward.
"The reason the future of work is so terrifying for much of the status quo is that so much of what we were doing in the workplace was stupid." You've nailed it here. And what they've done with the way they've approached WfH is stupid on steroids.
There are lots of different types of meetings, yet we talk about them as some homogeneous thing. Some should work better virtually - project reviews SHOULD be easier, more efficient and shorter done virtually. They often aren't because many managers are chronically bad at running them. Other meetings need to be open-ended and free-form (no, I don't mean 'Brainstorming' meetings), they are about building relationships and developing trust and they need time and space (but not necessarily 'in person'). Both of these types of meetings are really valuable but instead what we get is a bunch of aimless gatherings that are neither, produce nothing and are just a performance space for insecure or egotistical managers.
What Microsoft's survey shows is how routinely dreadful management is in most organisations. There is absolutely no need for it to be like this.
There is plenty of room to improve poorly run -- and to eliminate unnecessary -- meetings. But I'm starting to recognize a pattern in your recent posts. You seem to be advocating a future of transactional hermit work ("don't make me come to the office, I don't need to engage people", "don't make me talk to other humans, I don't need them to get my job done and I'm more productive without them").
There's a kind of cognitive dissonance in believing that we can remove physical human contact and not have it manifest elsewhere. Because here's the challenge: the future of work is human work. Anything that can be done without the messiness of inter-human collaboration and coordination is going to be among the first to be automated away, whether by robots or AI. If your work is that independent and deterministic, you're on the short list for machine replacement.
Either you lean into the techniques of the hard, messy problems of human collaboration or you face a machine race to the bottom. Conventional definitions of "Productivity" are a harsh master. They favor simple tasks, done routinely and independently without interruption. I.e., robot work. The work of the future is inherently inefficient.
Some people merely want to row the slave ship faster towards their own solitary irrelevance.
When everyone is working remote the bar for more endless meeting is lowered quite the fair amount since you don't even have to find an available meeting room or give people time to walk around. I think a lot of use have heard the phrase "I have to jump on another call" with people having back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings, which is absolutely pointless since you can't even prepare or post-process.
I like the idea of a meeting audit, I would also very much like if this was integrated in the scheduling applications. First off, it should not be possible to schedule a meeting without a written agenda and an expected result. Then for every invitee the opportunity cost should be calculated, lost time that could be spent doing something else. After the meeting the attendees can vote if the meeting was useful or not.
I once worked in a project with a fast approaching deadline. The solution by the management team (the project team was split nearly half between managers and those who wrote code, many of the latter were Freelancers) was of course to hold more meetings. Like twice daily status meetings. I usually declined those, no one really argued when I said "I can either do the work or talk about the work, I'm updating JIRA, the code is in a git repository, I'm updating people asynchronously in Slack - what else do you want?". This was likely convincing to the "managers" but made them feel even more powerless, I think they saw meetings as a way to increase the pressure, never mind people already working late and weekends. I'm definitely not going to waste my time sitting in a lot of calls when I have to make that time up during the weekend.
It is quite telling that the output of the coders could be measured every which way, e.g. Tickets worked on, code lines added/removed, bugs fixed/introduced, merge requests commented etc. while those who didn't write code had close to zero oversight or accountability. There also is often a parallel structure where managers use different and usually less effective tools like Powerpoint, Excel and you have people who mostly move data from JIRA or Gitlab or Trello or whatever to Excel or Powerpoint to use in their meetings.
No one seems to monitor the productivity drains. As I am a Freelancer and currently charging by the hour I tend to mark the time spent at meetings to my timetracking to make this at least partially auditable.
I suspect some of the growth in meetings during Covid is an attempt to substitute for informal contact that happens naturally in the office. I have to admit to having done this. It is not good.
Best use of that Q1 holiday you always work: go through your calendar, pare back participation for ones you run, opt out of the least productive 25% of other people’s meetings, kill the least productive 25% of your own meetings, and cut the frequency of the next 25% by half.
My group recently did the inverse of synchronized group work. The all blocked off the same time as non- meeting time, with the understanding that we’d avoid bothering each other unless needed to unblock ourselves. It is working great. 10/10 would not meet again.
100% agree with about 80 per cent of this. Violently disagree with this:
"I genuinely think it’s good to have recurring check-ins, but only if they are organized with the understanding that the work is more important than the check-in, and that things can be rescheduled, or at the very least cut short if real work needs to happen"
Pastoral care check-ins, relationship-building, kitchen conversations, pub drinks -- are they "necessary" for work to happen? Absolutely not. But I wouldn't want to be part of a workplace that didn't value them. And sometimes these things happen in bullshit meetings. 121s need more than just productivity chat.
I'm one of those of people that quit my job last year for a variety of reasons, one of them being no accountability or agendas when it came to meetings. I definitely experienced all of the bad meeting habits you mention. As I interview for new jobs, I wonder what an org will look like that actually uses good meeting etiquette, and will I even be able to find one or am I looking for a needle in a haystack?!? If I end up working as a fully remote employee, how will I forge those new relationships without meetings? Which is why I'm thinking maybe a hybrid setup would be best for me. On the other hand, I'm so done with the manager types who drone on and on and on... "human beings are poor moderators of their own speech" part hit the nail on the head.
Another related thought...While reading this, I remember with dread how many of my coworkers calendars would have every hour of every day blocked off...it was impossible to setup a meeting because there was never any availability. Like a page from a child's coloring book, they had to color it all in. Talk about corporate security blanket!
I've been WFH since 1998, with the exception of two office stints totaling about 5.5 years.
As a product manager, the work I do requires me to talk to and interact with other people, in real time, with shared artifacts. This goes fastest and works best when we are all in the same room, period, full stop. I have 20+ years of experience proving that to me.
I'm curious about what the alternative to having meetings is for someone like me-- the 30min I spent going over design prototypes with the engineering and design leads for a new feature was far more efficient for all 3 of us than doing a static review of wireframes and specs asynchronously. And don't tell me "just use Slack/Teams."
It's 100% true that a *bad* meeting (where "bad" means "poorly run," "with no or an ill-defined agenda," etc) is a waste of time. Solution: don't allow bad meetings in your sphere of influence.
I'm also curious about others' experience with late email senders. Is this really because someone with the whip hand is forcing people to answer their email Or Else? For me, my workday typically goes 0530-1330 with an hour or so for lunch, but I feel free to walk the dogs, snuggle my wife, go for a long run, run errands, etc during that time, and sometimes that means I may be answering emails at 10pm. So what? No one's *making* me do that, and the flexibility is well worth it.
I have a lot of battle-hardened thoughts on this - because I have a chronically-ill spouse, so I was largely WFH for years before the pandemic. I got *very* used to making work from home work. When we saw the pandemic coming in February 2020, I was the guy charged with getting departments to cooperate to make full company WFH feasible - and we made it, and it worked great.
My job title is Senior System Administrator. That means I'm at a level where half my job is esoteric beep-boop computer touching, but the other half - and I do mean 50% or so - is internal public relations. I write emails that are functionally press releases to three or four people.
I join half-hour meetings that should have been emails - because it is 100% more likely the other person will do the damn thing you are asking them than if you sent it as an email, rather than an action list item after a half-hour meeting.
The thing about WFH when others are in the office is that you *absolutely* have to work your arse off to be visible as present.
When you're all WFH, it can be super annoying. I complained to my boss's boss that being expected to be an on-call Twitch streamer in a professional context was utterly draining. I can do it, but I really do not like it.
On the other hand ... I find we really do need those meetings.
The main thing is to have the meetings clearly set out, with purposes and agendas (as meetings should always have) and as far as possible well in advance. Regular meetings must be regular too, not randomly skipped so you don't get yourself worked up into meeting mode for nothing.
We have also onboarded new techies. They need meetings - the meaningful sort, I mean - to get up to speed! I can't see a way around this.
Mostly I suspect the secret is not letting meetings become in any way ad-hoc. NO MULCH. And my afternoons are usually clear for actual work and thought.
I don't find the 250% figure outlandish. But we've learnt to wield ours reasonably well, after a shaky start .
That said, I'm at a company that's very firm about working hours - when you're done for the day, you are *done* - work/life balance and your family comes first. A relative was ill recently and I was on hospital support duty for three weeks, trying and mostly failing to work on NHS wifi. Meetings were not a thing that was going to happen.
And even with that, we made a *bundle* of cash in 2020 and 2021, and are firmly established that WFH is the way we're going forward.
So I am in fact very lucky.
"The reason the future of work is so terrifying for much of the status quo is that so much of what we were doing in the workplace was stupid." You've nailed it here. And what they've done with the way they've approached WfH is stupid on steroids.
There are lots of different types of meetings, yet we talk about them as some homogeneous thing. Some should work better virtually - project reviews SHOULD be easier, more efficient and shorter done virtually. They often aren't because many managers are chronically bad at running them. Other meetings need to be open-ended and free-form (no, I don't mean 'Brainstorming' meetings), they are about building relationships and developing trust and they need time and space (but not necessarily 'in person'). Both of these types of meetings are really valuable but instead what we get is a bunch of aimless gatherings that are neither, produce nothing and are just a performance space for insecure or egotistical managers.
What Microsoft's survey shows is how routinely dreadful management is in most organisations. There is absolutely no need for it to be like this.
There is plenty of room to improve poorly run -- and to eliminate unnecessary -- meetings. But I'm starting to recognize a pattern in your recent posts. You seem to be advocating a future of transactional hermit work ("don't make me come to the office, I don't need to engage people", "don't make me talk to other humans, I don't need them to get my job done and I'm more productive without them").
There's a kind of cognitive dissonance in believing that we can remove physical human contact and not have it manifest elsewhere. Because here's the challenge: the future of work is human work. Anything that can be done without the messiness of inter-human collaboration and coordination is going to be among the first to be automated away, whether by robots or AI. If your work is that independent and deterministic, you're on the short list for machine replacement.
Either you lean into the techniques of the hard, messy problems of human collaboration or you face a machine race to the bottom. Conventional definitions of "Productivity" are a harsh master. They favor simple tasks, done routinely and independently without interruption. I.e., robot work. The work of the future is inherently inefficient.
Some people merely want to row the slave ship faster towards their own solitary irrelevance.
When everyone is working remote the bar for more endless meeting is lowered quite the fair amount since you don't even have to find an available meeting room or give people time to walk around. I think a lot of use have heard the phrase "I have to jump on another call" with people having back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings, which is absolutely pointless since you can't even prepare or post-process.
I like the idea of a meeting audit, I would also very much like if this was integrated in the scheduling applications. First off, it should not be possible to schedule a meeting without a written agenda and an expected result. Then for every invitee the opportunity cost should be calculated, lost time that could be spent doing something else. After the meeting the attendees can vote if the meeting was useful or not.
I once worked in a project with a fast approaching deadline. The solution by the management team (the project team was split nearly half between managers and those who wrote code, many of the latter were Freelancers) was of course to hold more meetings. Like twice daily status meetings. I usually declined those, no one really argued when I said "I can either do the work or talk about the work, I'm updating JIRA, the code is in a git repository, I'm updating people asynchronously in Slack - what else do you want?". This was likely convincing to the "managers" but made them feel even more powerless, I think they saw meetings as a way to increase the pressure, never mind people already working late and weekends. I'm definitely not going to waste my time sitting in a lot of calls when I have to make that time up during the weekend.
It is quite telling that the output of the coders could be measured every which way, e.g. Tickets worked on, code lines added/removed, bugs fixed/introduced, merge requests commented etc. while those who didn't write code had close to zero oversight or accountability. There also is often a parallel structure where managers use different and usually less effective tools like Powerpoint, Excel and you have people who mostly move data from JIRA or Gitlab or Trello or whatever to Excel or Powerpoint to use in their meetings.
No one seems to monitor the productivity drains. As I am a Freelancer and currently charging by the hour I tend to mark the time spent at meetings to my timetracking to make this at least partially auditable.
Dammit. I accidentally deleted my own comment.
Unconnected comments --
I suspect some of the growth in meetings during Covid is an attempt to substitute for informal contact that happens naturally in the office. I have to admit to having done this. It is not good.
Best use of that Q1 holiday you always work: go through your calendar, pare back participation for ones you run, opt out of the least productive 25% of other people’s meetings, kill the least productive 25% of your own meetings, and cut the frequency of the next 25% by half.
My group recently did the inverse of synchronized group work. The all blocked off the same time as non- meeting time, with the understanding that we’d avoid bothering each other unless needed to unblock ourselves. It is working great. 10/10 would not meet again.
100% agree with about 80 per cent of this. Violently disagree with this:
"I genuinely think it’s good to have recurring check-ins, but only if they are organized with the understanding that the work is more important than the check-in, and that things can be rescheduled, or at the very least cut short if real work needs to happen"
Pastoral care check-ins, relationship-building, kitchen conversations, pub drinks -- are they "necessary" for work to happen? Absolutely not. But I wouldn't want to be part of a workplace that didn't value them. And sometimes these things happen in bullshit meetings. 121s need more than just productivity chat.
I'm one of those of people that quit my job last year for a variety of reasons, one of them being no accountability or agendas when it came to meetings. I definitely experienced all of the bad meeting habits you mention. As I interview for new jobs, I wonder what an org will look like that actually uses good meeting etiquette, and will I even be able to find one or am I looking for a needle in a haystack?!? If I end up working as a fully remote employee, how will I forge those new relationships without meetings? Which is why I'm thinking maybe a hybrid setup would be best for me. On the other hand, I'm so done with the manager types who drone on and on and on... "human beings are poor moderators of their own speech" part hit the nail on the head.
Another related thought...While reading this, I remember with dread how many of my coworkers calendars would have every hour of every day blocked off...it was impossible to setup a meeting because there was never any availability. Like a page from a child's coloring book, they had to color it all in. Talk about corporate security blanket!
I've been WFH since 1998, with the exception of two office stints totaling about 5.5 years.
As a product manager, the work I do requires me to talk to and interact with other people, in real time, with shared artifacts. This goes fastest and works best when we are all in the same room, period, full stop. I have 20+ years of experience proving that to me.
I'm curious about what the alternative to having meetings is for someone like me-- the 30min I spent going over design prototypes with the engineering and design leads for a new feature was far more efficient for all 3 of us than doing a static review of wireframes and specs asynchronously. And don't tell me "just use Slack/Teams."
It's 100% true that a *bad* meeting (where "bad" means "poorly run," "with no or an ill-defined agenda," etc) is a waste of time. Solution: don't allow bad meetings in your sphere of influence.
I'm also curious about others' experience with late email senders. Is this really because someone with the whip hand is forcing people to answer their email Or Else? For me, my workday typically goes 0530-1330 with an hour or so for lunch, but I feel free to walk the dogs, snuggle my wife, go for a long run, run errands, etc during that time, and sometimes that means I may be answering emails at 10pm. So what? No one's *making* me do that, and the flexibility is well worth it.