Meeting Inflation: Navigating the Overload

In today’s fast-paced modern world, meetings have become an inescapable part of our professional lives. From daily stand-ups to quarterly strategy sessions, our calendars are jampacked with back-to-back meetings, leaving little time for actual work. Does this feel familiar?

This phenomenon, often referred to as “meeting inflation,” is not only draining our productivity but also hindering our ability to innovate and achieve our goals. Both at work and at home.

The rise of meeting inflation can be attributed to several factors.

Firstly, the increasing complexity of work projects often requires collaboration across multiple teams and departments. This is just a normal part of everyday life today, especially after the pandemic, now that the option for remote work is widely adopted.

This ‘new normal’ necessitates more frequent meetings to align our and other goals, coordinate tasks and resolve potential and actual conflicts.

Secondly, the rise of digital communication tools has made it easier (maybe too easy) to schedule and attend meetings even with geographically dispersed teams. While this has increased accessibility it has also led to a surge in the number of meetings. Anyone that can attend a meeting is invited and the result is an unstructured mess with too many hands-on calls to really be productive. I think we all can admit having attended a few meetings while mainly lurking in the background, with the webcam off and the mic on mute, trying to get some real work done.

Or maybe that is just me?

Meetings in themselves can be valuable for sharing information, making decisions and building relationships. But the sheer volume of meetings can quickly become counterproductive. Excessive meetings can lead to sheer information overload and decision fatigue. Leading us to have a decline in productivity as well as being a huge strain on our mental health.

When we spend too much of our time in meetings, we have less time to focus on our actual work. This in turn leads to missed or overshot deadlines, decreased efficiency and a decline in overall job satisfaction. While meetings are great, very few actually likes them.

To combat meeting inflation, it’s essential to adopt strategies that prioritize efficiency and effectiveness. Here are some practical tips:

• Limit Meeting Duration. Short and focused meetings are often more productive than long, rambling ones. So, we need to set strict time limits for meetings and enforce them. Easily said than done, but still. Consider using a timer or a physical clock to keep everyone on track. And leave room in the schedule to summarize and round things off.

• Establish Clear Agendas. Before a meeting, we need to send out a detailed agenda outlining the topics to be discussed and the desired outcomes. This will help participants come prepared and stay focused as well as be aligned with what we hope to achieve.

• Invite Only Relevant Participants. This one is particularly hard. Ensure that only those who need to be in the meeting are invited. Avoid unnecessary attendees who might distract from the discussion. More is not always better and when it comes to meeting the classical two pizza method seems to be the golden standard. If there are more people in any given meeting than could share two pizzas for a quick lunch, then there probably are too many at the table.

• Encourage Participation. Facilitate open discussions and encourage everyone to contribute. It’s too easy to be sidelined or just a passive observer in a meeting and the real values, both to the meeting in general and the individual, is in participating. As the person holding the meeting it is crucial that we avoid dominating the conversation. Use techniques like round-robin discussions and open questions to elicit input from all participants. If the attendees really are relevant, their input is as well.

• Take Actionable Steps. At the end of each meeting, summarize key decisions and next steps and assign clear responsibilities and deadlines to ensure follow-through. This ensures that the meeting is not just filler in our calendars but something that brings value.

• Evaluate Meeting Effectiveness. Regularly assess the value of your meetings. Ask yourself if the meeting achieved its objectives and if it could have been accomplished through other means. If a meeting is not adding value, consider canceling it or finding a more efficient way to address the issue. There are so many meeting that just keeps being scheduled for the simple reason that they have become tradition, a routine, that needs to be fulfilled.

• Foster a Culture of Productivity. Encourage your team to prioritize deep work and minimize distractions and create a work environment that supports focus and productivity. Should we have meeting free days? Is there a way keep focus and still get the information that the meeting was meant to convey?

• Consider Alternatives to Meetings. This is the most important tips of all the above. For routine updates or information sharing, consider using email, instant messaging, or project management tools instead of scheduling a meeting. Often, we don’t need meetings at all. What we need are better emails (more about that in a later blogpost) that gets our message across and gets a response, or actions taken, from the people receiving it.

By implementing these strategies, organizations can effectively manage meeting inflation and create a more productive and efficient work environment.

If we eliminate the burden of excessive meetings, employees can regain focus and achieve their goals, managers can get information across, and the organization can see an increase in productivity. Just by shifting the culture and respecting each other’s time.

Remember, the goal is not to eliminate meetings altogether but to ensure that they are used strategically and effectively to achieve desired outcomes. In the end, the battle against meeting inflation is not just about saving time. It’s about creating a healthier, more sustainable, and more productive work culture.