The data is unequivocal: the fewer the meetings, the better the results for your business, and every employee knows it. Software company Atlassian surveyed 7,000 people across the globe and found that 78% of workers said that excessive meetings prevented them from getting work done, 72% of meetings were ineffective, and 80% said they’d be more effective if they spent less time in them. The estimate was a whopping 31 hours a month being lost to pointless meetings.

The largest study yet conducted on the topic, by the NEOMA Business School in Reims, went on to prove it: they persuaded 76 international companies to introduce meeting-free days, and after surveying 25,000 affected employees they all reported increased happiness and productivity as a result of having fewer meetings. Best results were reported from companies who had three meeting-free days a week, but even a single meeting-free day saw an impact. The problem is not so much how to improve meeting culture, it’s how to reduce the number of meetings full stop.

That might seem like an impossible prospect, particularly if your calendar currently looks like a particularly bad Tetris run. But cutting down the number of meetings at work is easier than you’d think. The key is accepting that most meetings are not fit for purpose: you don’t need a meeting, you need a better way to communicate. You can stop people working in different directions without waiting for a meeting to go through everything.

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1. Review your meetings and identify what they’re actually for

To have fewer meetings, you need to know what they’re trying to achieve. A great classification process by Cam Daigle breaks meetings down into three types, and knowing which is which helps to both make them more effective or - in our case - ditch them entirely:

• Status meetings are to disseminate information: things like progress on an audit, communicating goals, or a quarterly performance update. They’re hosted and controlled by a manager
• Feedback meetings are for people to receive information they need to do their job 
• Decision meetings are to review multiple options and reach a decision on which to select.

Daigle goes into some detail on the power structure and format of these meetings, but this classification makes it simpler for you to evaluate what you’re looking for and consider non-meeting solutions. Status meetings are always the first candidate for “could this be an email”, because you rarely need to get people in a room just to tell them things - but feedback and decision meetings are candidates for at least reducing the number of attendees to those who purely need to be there.

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2. Ditch the agenda and convert it to questions

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Every meeting needs an agenda, otherwise it’s a recipe for people talking past each other. But agendas themselves can easily become laundry lists of people or projects, creating communication that doesn’t serve your overall goals. Often, they’re recycled, with regular weekly or monthly meetings covering the same talking points regardless of progress. A great recommendation from The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance is to reform the agenda as questions: what are you seeking to achieve? Who can answer? 

Framing an agenda as a series of questions makes it possible to consider who can satisfactorily answer the question, and the degree to which that needs to be done in person. If an agenda item can be boiled down to “what’s the progress on this project?” then that’s a prime candidate for having a single project leader share an update - which can be done without anybody entering a meeting room or Zoom lobby.

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3. Switch to regular communication, and ditch “wait for the meeting”

Once you’ve identified the key outcomes and questions, commit to reaching them without requiring a meeting. This will require a bit of prep and ongoing homework. You need to make a clear commitment to move away from meetings and empower your team to do the same - you will probably find them willing participants. This needs to be backed by a daily and weekly communication strategy that ensures key information is communicated effectively. The key requirements are:

• Sharing the information that would have been in the meeting, particularly information that people need for their current objectives, and overall progress against goals
• A process for capturing comments and feedback that might previously have been conducted in the meeting
• Listing action items and who owns them

You can do a lot of this via email, but putting more strain on your inbox can be counter-productive. Using task management software like Workiro enables you to assign and prioritise tasks, and share updates and comments for each project, from a single hub. It means that your team can simply refer to a central location to view documents, emails and approvals, and see what’s outstanding from all sides.

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4. Use tools, not meetings, to track progress

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Taking turns to share updates round the table is a highly inefficient way to review progress - online task management tools offer much more effective ways to track things, and if you use Workiro you don’t need to add anything to your existing tech stack. It gives you a simple unified view across existing Office365 and NetSuite integrations, putting all your key data in one place and meaning you can view progress at a glance. You can use Google-style search to find documents and see if they’ve been actioned, and view an audit-ready email trail behind them - no need to get people together to review how people are getting on.

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5. Use simple online collaboration to bring staff and clients together

Externally-facing meetings can be some of the most arduous: you have to balance the calendars of two businesses rather than one, and balance efficiency on your side with good service for clients. Workiro enables centralised communication for both your team and your clients, with secure access for external stakeholders to view progress and leave comments. That means you can view each project, review progress, assign tasks and have clear discussions within a single Workiro interface in a way that includes your clients and captures their feedback, without needing to corral people into calls. Because Workiro maintains an audit-ready trail of files and communications, you can easily see what’s been discussed and agreed, and quickly refer back to it in future client discussions or meetings. It’s a huge time-saver, and means you avoid both meetings and minutes - a double victory.

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6. Give quick feedback using chat

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Giving feedback - good and bad, or perhaps good and “constructive” if you want to be polite - is essential for maintaining team output and morale, but you don’t need to get people in a room for it. Using business instant messaging solutions like Slack, Teams or Workiro means you can give quick notes or attaboy comments at any point. Once again, the advantage of Workio is that it brings everything together into a single platform: you can view the progress of a project, see if and when documents have been approved, and send a quick message through the integrated instant messaging client. It’s quick, easy, and it means people don’t lose focus flicking between different apps.

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7. Set clear expectations and be sure to follow up

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A key part of having fewer meetings is setting clear expectations for how people should communicate. Make clear that simple status updates and client feedback can be done through online tools like Workiro, so that your team knows they should head there rather than waiting for the next meeting. Demonstrate commitment by using it yourself, and using the instant messaging tool to leave notes and comments. That leaves your remaining meetings clear to focus on key decisions and actions.

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8. Designate meeting-free days

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The most important lesson from the NEOMA global study is that creating meeting-free days has a measurable impact on both productivity and staff happiness. Banning meetings for a whole day is a powerful commitment to productivity and compels your team to embrace more effective ways of working. Encourage people to use these days for focus time - blocking out their calendar to focus on a specific task, without interruptions that waste time and energy switching between applications.

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9. Lead by example

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You need to commit to the low-meeting life, and demonstrate it to your team. If you can’t enforce it across the entire business, start with just your group and let the results speak for themselves. A company cited by research in Harvard Business Review found that one division’s commitment to meeting-free days was met “first with consternation, then with curiosity, and ultimately with change throughout the organisation as norms were shattered and new ways of working were modeled.” Be the change you want to see in the office, and you could find yourself leading a quiet revolution.

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10. Keep the 1:1s, because they’re now more important than ever

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Once you’ve cut back on the big meetings, it’s essential to maintain the small ones. In-person communication is absolutely vital for giving and receiving feedback from team members, and ensuring that people both feel heard and get the advice they need to excel. Make sure that it’s a true two-way conversation in which people can air their feelings and concerns, and encourage candour - make every session count, and come out of it with clear notes and next steps. The good news is that you can keep the scope of these meetings much tighter, because you’ve covered the big-picture stuff already.

To find out more about how Workiro can liberate you from meetings and enable effortless communication with both clients and colleagues, join a group demo or set up a call with one of our team.