Everyone Loves Meetings

Everyone loves meetings. No matter how many invites we receive, we accept and do our best to attend. We accept them even if we already have conflicts. We schedule meetings. We include anyone and everyone that might be interested.

I overheard someone comment that it was difficult to get things done because they had so many meetings. Just when they got in the zone, they had another meeting popup. It's a common problem, but it's largely self inflicted. We tolerate meetings because our coworkers are just trying to keep us informed.

A while back, I inherited a new team. Everyone was trying to figure out the reality of this new team while trying to transition out of their old role at the same time. It's a common problem in lean work environments. One thing that we quickly discover was the planning a simple team standup was difficult. We all had existing meetings on our calendars. I had everyone send me their total weekly hours spent in recurring meetings. We lost almost 40% of our week to standing meetings. Everyone complained about their meeting load.

We needed a quick remedy if we wanted the new team to come up to speed quickly.  Everyone immediately dropped any meetings where they were not an active participant. Our meeting saturation dropped to 30%, then almost 20%. Definitely a major improvement. We also made a team agreement not to schedule any standing meetings after noon. We intended for the afternoon hours to be used on focused activities. We allowed ad-hoc meetings in the afternoon since they are usually focused on a specific problem or task. We cut them shorter to force everyone to get the point. As we rescheduled and merged our meetings, we were able to dropped our meeting saturation to under 15%.

We did receive some gripes that we didn't accept meetings even though our calendar was open. What do you mean that your team doesn't attend standing meetings after noon? Maybe we should try that.