Are Meetings Hurting Your Business?

I have strong opinions about meetings.

I suspect, for a lot of employees, they like to fill their calendars with meetings because it feels like work, it feels productive.

It’s a way for them to have an answer to the question: “What did you do this week?”

But, like, besides being in meetings, what do you ACTUALLY do for the company?

Meetings are often pointless, busy work where nothing actually gets done.

There are two often overlooked cost to meetings:

👉 Channel-switching cost – Meetings interrupt deep, focused work where it can be difficult to return to that same mental state
👉 Monetary cost – Considering the hourly wage of each employee – meetings are expensive! A reoccurring, weekly, hour-long meeting can cost the company tens of thousands of dollars per year

I find meetings can be a lot of fluff, philosophizing, grandstanding, and reporting, and rarely are actionable items discussed.

Of, if they are, you may not even have enough time in the week to do what was discussed because you’re in so many meetings.

So here’s my policy on meetings:

👉 If it can be a Teams / Slack / Loom / text / email, do that first!
👉 Always respect people’s time

If you must book a meeting:

👉 Only invite those necessary
👉 Make it as short as possible
👉 Be prepared! Have an agenda, have questions you want answered, walk away with action items, take detailed notes, follow up…