It’s Time For A Meeting Diet

Starting the New Year, lots of people began diets, many of them likely abandoned by now. But, there’s one diet you can start any time. This diet will make your team happier, more productive, and more engaged. It’s a meeting diet.

Meeting Friction

Meetings consume massive amounts of time, often with little benefit. One regular meeting of top executives in a company was found to consume 300,000 hours per year!

In my book Friction, I cite other troubling meeting statistics to show how much unnecessary effort they can cause. A study by Bain & Company found that a typical midlevel manager or front-line supervisor had just 6 1/2 hours per week of uninterrupted time — despite working an average of 47 hours a week!

Another study by the Boston Consulting Group found that meetings and other unproductive activities wasted 40 to 80% of people’s time in the office, killing productivity while increasing “suffering.”

Even the process of scheduling meetings can waste almost five hours per week. Using scheduling software can make organizing meetings faster, but doing so comes with a risk: these programs make it easy to invite people with just a click or two. That seems efficient, but can also lead to bigger meetings that aren’t essential for some attendees.

Shopify’s Meeting Break

Shopify, the big e-commerce platform, is taking bold steps to reduce the number of meetings its employees attend. “Meetings are usually a bug,” according to Tobi Lutke, the firm’s founder.

In a memo to staff, the company said it would eliminate all recurring meetings with three or more people and impose a two-week "cooling off period" before any of those meetings can be added back to calendars.

Additionally, the company will reinstate meeting-free Wednesdays and limit large “all hands” meetings with over 50 people to a six-hour window on Thursdays. The moves are intended to free up employee time. Shopify claims the changes will delete nearly 10,000 events from employee calendars and create over 76,500 hours of time for other, presumably more productive, activities.

At Shopify, meetings are seen as part of the “maker vs. manager” conflict. COO Kaz Nejatian announced the meeting cancellations, tweeting “Let's give people back their maker time. Companies are for builders. Not managers.”

In addition to the meeting cancellation process, Shopify uses automation to alert anyone who tries to schedule a meeting on Wednesday. They also encourage employees to leave large Slack groups.

The Meeting Diet

Like food diets, meeting diets come in all shapes and sizes. I find the Shopify “kill all meetings” approach interesting. It’s a bit like weight loss diets that start with a week or two of severe restriction before reverting to a healthy but more sustainable eating plan.

Shopify’s approach also resembles zero-based budgeting, a technique used to reduce costs by re-examining every expense when preparing annual budgets vs. the normal practice of carrying most line items over.

As with food diets, it’s not the first couple of weeks that count the most. Rather, it’s what happens in subsequent weeks and what a long-term maintenance plan looks like.

Here are a few ideas to help you plan your own meeting diet:

1. Implement a "no-meeting day" or "meeting-free day" each week to give employees at least one full day of dedicated time to focus on individual tasks.
2. Limit the number of attendees at meetings — only invite those who are truly necessary for decision-making and discussion. Some companies set their meeting software to enforce a size limit, e.g., three invitees maximum. Approval is necessary to invite more.
3. Empower employees to both question the need for each meeting and decline to attend if they have little to contribute or gain.
4. Video conferencing and online collaboration tools can save time if everyone isn’t in the same place. But, Zoom meetings still consume valuable time.
5. As an alternative or complement to a “no-meeting” day, set a "no-meeting hour" for each day.
6. If a meeting is important enough that it can’t be canceled, consider reducing its duration.
7. Periodically, remind people that, as Lutke says, meetings are usually “a bug.” Be sure everyone feels empowered to question the necessity of a meeting, its duration, and their need to attend.

Even if you aren’t a CEO like Lutke, try adopting a meeting diet in your part of the organization, however small that might be. You’ll give time back to people in your group, and, with luck, the idea will spread.