Spend Less Time In Meetings This Summer

With the average employee spending 31 monthly hours in unproductive meetings, it’s also where you’re poised to spend 100 painful hours in Summer 2023. Given that just a handful of meetings you attend are actually productive — the rest are why you don’t have enough time for work that truly matters — make it a priority to conduct a meeting audit this June.

Open your calendar or schedule, and review your recurring meetings: daily, weekly, monthly, etc. Make a list of those which are a productive use of your time and set those aside. Now, create another list with every meeting that’s a waste of your time. Once you’ve captured those, use the approaches below for opportunities to eliminate, shorten or otherwise improve your meetings.

Eliminate meetings

Taking an aggressive stance, software company TechSmith Corp. experimented with no meetings for a month — relying solely on asynchronous communication — and tracked a 15% increase in productivity.

How many of the time-wasting meetings you attend bring zero value to the business? If you’re in a position to cancel meetings that have clearly outlived their usefulness, delete those now. If you need permission, consider requesting a one-month or summer pause on the biggest time-wasters.

Shorten meetings

For those unproductive meetings that still hold some value, could you reduce time spent on these by introducing a maximum of two slides for presentations? When pharmaceutical giant Novartis NVS implemented this change, it not only shortened the length of its quarterly meetings, it reduced prep time for every level of staff.

Another effective tactic for is to initiate meeting parameters like Netflix NFLX did. Now, no internal meetings last more than thirty minutes, and all materials must be provided and read ahead of the meeting, not during. The result? A 65% reduction in meetings.

Lessen the frequency

In my experience, unless your teams are working toward a launch, no meeting needs to happen daily. If you attend any unproductive meetings that are held daily, huddle with the meeting host to determine whether it could move to weekly or twice-weekly.

Now, look beyond your daily meetings: Which of your weekly meetings should be converted into monthly? Could any monthly meetings become quarterly? Changes like these can add up to major time savings a year from now.

And because meetings are known for interrupting focused work, consider designating one day a week this summer as 100% meeting-free like Shopify and Asana have. Employees report that a day without meetings adds up to less burnout and more productivity and allows them to do deep work.

Introduce protocols

To avoid spending your newly freed-up time in someone’s newly created meeting, commit to only going meetings with a Decision-Maker in attendance. At pharma company Bristol Myers Squibb BMY , employees are encouraged to ask “Who’s the decision maker?” before responding. Along this same vein, two more best practices include requiring a clear agenda sent ahead of the meeting and a hard limit of seven or fewer people in attendance.

Reducing and deleting unproductive meetings not only boosts employee satisfaction, it also helps companies dramatically cut costs. Annual savings are around $2.5M for organizations with 100 employees, and a staggering $100M for those with 5000 employees. (For the actual cost of any meeting you attend, borrow this free calculator and prepare to cringe.)

When your schedule looks more like a Tetris game than a calendar belonging to a human person, turn to a meeting audit. By treating meetings like the goal-oriented events they should be, you and your teams have a fighting chance of spending Summer Fridays at the beach or lake — instead of glaring at a laptop.