How can organizations tackle meeting sprawl in the WFH environment?


457 views3 Upvotes3 Comments

Senior Executive Advisor in Software, 10,001+ employees
You first have to measure the sprawl. You find out what your current state is, how many meetings there are in a day, and then try to introduce new steps to reduce the number of meetings. Try to figure out how much time you are saving? How much time are the people saving? Run this over a quarter and then repeat your survey that you're doing and see how many points you move. 

And so, how do you reduce some of these meetings? First, ask the question: is this meeting really necessary? I know that because we have lost the security of interacting with people, sometimes it becomes straightforward to talk to someone rather than send an email or on asynchronous communication, but ask yourself, do you really need this meeting? If it's a decision-making item, just have a vote on Slack or any one of your messengers. There are so many ways rather than having a 30-minute meeting. Send a project status in a similar way, asynchronously works out pretty fine. We don't have to have a meeting where people project and talk. 

And when you do need a meeting, have smarter meetings. This is something great, like 25 minutes instead of 30, and 50 minutes instead of one hour. It allows people to context switch and get up and move, and you really need to do that. You can't spend so many hours stuck in one place. That's not healthy for us. Empower people to decline a meeting. If there is a meeting invite without a clear agenda or expectations included, I've empowered all my teams to decline the meeting. That's actually helped. We've had fewer meetings, we've had smarter meetings, and we've had much more crisp, outcome-driven meetings out of this. This is something super operational and extremely specific that you can do and see how it works within your organization.
3
CIO in Education, 201 - 500 employees
Model boundaries, teach how to manage scheduling.
1
CIO in Education, 1,001 - 5,000 employees
Have shorter meetings. Schedule a logical 5 minute break on either side of the hour to give people a logical chance to stretch, bio break, etc.

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