3 Tips For Managing Too Many Meetings
Episode 445 | Author: Emilie Aries
What you can do when the meeting melee becomes unmanageable.
How many meeting invites did you accept this week?
The discussion around excessive meetings has been a hot topic lately. Recent research shows that 70% of all meetings are keeping employees from completing their tasks, rather than providing the information and connection necessary for stronger work. On top of that, a 2022 article in Harvard Business Review reported that “ineffective meetings that waste our time can negatively impact psychological, physical, and mental well-being.” Yikes!
Turning down a meeting is easier said than done. Your organization’s established company culture and concern for professional relationships, among other factors, can make it anxiety-inducing to even consider clicking anything but that little “yes” box. However, figuring out how to navigate this field can not only win you back some of the time you lose to endless check-ins and stand-ups—it can also help turn the tide on how your company as a whole approaches meetings.
On today’s episode, I cover three steps that can help reduce the number of meetings you’re beholden to.
#1: Respectfully request more information
Chances are, most of your meeting invites come with just three details: when, where, and with whom. The description field is too often left empty, which leaves you with next to no information about what you’re being called to attend.
The first step to tackling your meeting surplus is to figure out which meetings are actually necessary. The best way to do this is to reach out to the coworker who sent the invite and request an agenda, a reason for your inclusion in the invite, or simply a bit more context. If you have a bit of the people pleaser about you, you can frame this as wanting to ensure you’re properly prepared.
In her book The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, Priya Parker says that whatever the get-together—be it a conference, baby shower, or team meeting—if the objective isn’t clear from the start, then it hasn’t been developed with intention. If whoever invited you doesn’t have an answer to your very reasonable question, it’s time to consider step two.
#2: Dare to decline
As much as some company culture edicts want us to believe it, clicking the “no” option in your meeting invite won’t cause your computer or your company to explode. If you don’t think you will contribute to the meeting or you don’t think it’s a productive use of your time, it’s ok to decline! And if the mere thought of that ramps up your heart rate, you can always click “maybe.”
Dreading the decline is completely understandable. We all want to be team players and appear supportive, especially when invites roll in from someone more senior. When step #1 proves a lack of forethought behind the invite, though, your “meeting” issue turns into one of relationship management.
By actively managing key relationships with your boss and other stakeholders in the company, the concept of saying no starts feeling less like a threat. You can frame your questions or veto as a newfound focus on bringing agendas to all your meetings or as a sign of your goal to amp up your productivity to deliver 110%. However you approach it, broaching the discussion around no longer having meetings for meetings’ sake can lead the way to a significant positive impact on your organization.
#3: Transition from micro to macro
Questioning the meeting culture in your company is an act of leadership in and of itself, and it can certainly take a lot of social capital to feel comfortable doing this. But once you’ve started putting steps 1 and 2 into practice, you can start to increase the reach of your initiative.
Take a look at all the repeating time blocks on your calendar. How productive are those daily, weekly, or bi-weekly meetings? Often, they’re essentially status updates, which suggests an inefficient transfer of information across teams. Solid project management software or a well-run dashboard can largely take their place, outlining the key performance indicators (KPIs) and making it possible for you (or the team supervisor) to see where everyone is at any given moment.
All this is not to say that meetings are pointless. There is undoubtedly a time and place for the cross-pollination of ideas and face-to-face (digitally or IRL) team-building time. But it’s vital—to your company’s bottom line and employee wellbeing—to drill down on what’s essential and cut anything that doesn’t meet the mark.
Is your workplace guilty of too many meetings? If you’ve taken, or are considering taking, these or any other steps, visit our Courage Community on Facebook or join us in our group on LinkedIn. Share what’s holding you back or how your approach to curbing meeting immoderation played out!
Related Links From Today’s Episode:
Harvard Business Review article, “Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings”
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
My LinkedIn course, “Asserting Yourself: An Empowered Choice
Bossed Up Accelerator - Level Up
DISCOVER YOUR VOICE & COMMUNICATE ASSERTIVELY:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 445. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the founder and CEO of Bossed Up. And today we're talking all about how to push back on having way too many meetings in your work life.
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Okay, picture this. You're getting your work done. Your head's down, blinders on, deep into, let's say, document review or a writing assignment. When boop. Up into your inbox pops a calendar invitation, perhaps from your boss, or your boss's boss or a colleague in a totally different department, and all of a sudden, you feel like your day is being taken away from you. That is, in fact, what is happening when we blindly accept all the meeting invitations that come across our desk.
And this is becoming a huge problem across so many companies and organizations, many of which we've worked with here at Bossed Up, who have a culture of hosting too many meetings. New research shows that about 70% of all meetings are keeping employees from actually working and getting all their tasks done. While there was a 20% decrease in the average length of meeting during the pandemic, the number of meetings attended by a worker, on average, rose by 13.5%. It makes sense, I guess, if you think that many of us have gone into a remote or hybrid work schedule. Working with virtual teams has involved a lot more standing meetings, a lot more virtual meetings.
But a lot of evidence suggests, especially in this great HBR article from 2022 called Dear Manager, You're Holding Too Many Meetings, which I'll link to in today's show notes. Ineffective meetings or too many meetings that waste our time can have a really significant negative impact, both psychologically as well as physically and to your employee's mental well being. So, what is the employee supposed to do? What are you supposed to do when a meeting invitation comes across your desk, other than just sigh and accept it and feel like your time is being stolen from you? I've got three radical suggestions I want you to try out.
Or at the very least, just leave yourself open to experimenting with and see if putting these into practice can not only help you take your time back, but also benefit your entire work culture, your entire organizational culture, which, if yours is like many of ours, probably leans into hosting too many meetings. The first way to push back is to respectfully request more information. How many of these meeting invitations come across your desk with almost no details in them other than, where you need to be and how long it's going to take? Send an email back the next time you're requested to show up an event or at a meeting like this and ask, is there an agenda you could share ahead of time? Is there a particular reason you'd like me to be present at this meeting? What are you hoping my involvement might add to the conversation? Or just, can you share more context so I can show up prepared?
And if the person who's putting said meeting together cannot provide answers to those very reasonable questions, that takes me to my second suggestion, which is to dare to decline. Yes, I am saying that it is okay to say no. I will not be able to make that meeting invitation. Or at the very least, if it warms you up to the idea, at least reply with the maybe button, if that's an option. Now, what holds us back from doing this? Let's unpack the emotions here.
You might be freaking out internally because you don't want to disappoint. You're a people pleaser. You want to be seen as a team player. You don't want to be a pain in the a**, let's be real. Right. You want to be collegial and be, um, supportive of, especially if it's someone more senior to you who's saying, I need you to show up here to say no, or to say even maybe can feel like it puts those relationships at risk. So, this isn't really about meetings, is it? It's about relationship management.
If you are actively managing key relationships with your boss, with other stakeholders, both internally and externally, then the action of declining a meeting invitation becomes less of a threat to the good standing in that relationship.
So that might mean having a conversation about your shifting way of approaching meeting invitations, how you're really trying to bring an agenda to every single meeting and really question if you're hosting too many meetings because you don't want to infringe on people's time. Or maybe it's just about making sure your boss knows that you're delivering 110% of your deliverables, regardless of whether or not you can make every single meeting that they invite you to. And perhaps it even looks like having a frank conversation, like one of my coaching clients from earlier this year I was working with, who's a sales professional, he said to his team, you know, look, if you keep inviting me to all of these internal meetings, because we're a startup and there's lots of shifting terrain and lots to talk about, because things are constantly moving, you know, this really takes me away from the kinds of sales meetings that actually enables me to deliver on my OKRs, my objectives, and key results. So if you want me to deliver sales for this company, you're going to have to be okay with me. Declining meeting invitations. And that set off a whole company wide conversation in which the executive team said, we want to encourage people to say no to meeting invitations if they don't feel like it's a good use of their time.
And a lot of executives, a lot of bold executives, have provided that kind of cover for their team members to say, look, if you don't have an agenda, if you can't defend your reasoning for having these people in this meeting, that's an expensive meeting, as my husband likes to say. When he sees a meeting happening where there's five members of his team huddled around a table, perhaps listening to the founder's latest and greatest idea, he'll pull his boss aside and say, you know, this is like a $5,000 an hour meeting because of all the people that you have involved in this, is that a worthwhile use of our resources?
So really keeping in mind that time is money, and, you know, if we want to, especially if you're listening to this as a leader, or as a manager, or as someone who holds meetings, efficiency should not be punished, right? We should be really clear about the intention behind our meetings and be able to explain or defend why we're inviting the people we're inviting. Look, at the end of the day, if you never push back, if you never say no, or maybe in response to a meeting request, this enables other members of the company, other members of the team to dictate your priorities. You are not in the driver's seat when it comes to your priorities. And I totally get it sometimes, in fact, quite often, if you have a boss, you're going to ask them, hey, how do I align my priorities with yours? Because I want my boss's priorities to be clear so that I can deliver on her priorities, right?
But in high trust team environments, as Simon Sinek might call them, in environments where you have emotionally intelligent, healthy relationships, this kind of pushback should not threaten a relationship. This kind of pushback should be an encouraged and welcome question, which is simply, you know, is this the best use of all of our time? And if the answer is no, it's totally optional for you to be there. But I just wanted to invite you so you didn't feel left out, then that's a really helpful, clarifying conversation that enables you both to kind of breathe a sigh of relief and feel like you're not beholden to going to this meeting anymore, and they're not beholden to inviting you just out of the sake of wanting you to not feel left out.
My final piece of advice here is to take this from micro to macro. I want you to question all the standing meetings that you have on your day, on your week, on your monthly calendar. Question their utility. So often I see in the teams that I work with, meetings are held as a substitute for good project management. Now, project management is a very big topic. We don't have time to get into all the details on today's podcast. But, if you're holding weekly or biweekly or monthly meetings simply to give a status update, that tells me that this is really not the most efficient way to transfer information across teams and across people. The leaders that I've worked with in our leadership accelerator Level Up, I've really challenged them to say, how do you have some kind of dashboard where you as a leader can see the progress your team is making at any point in time without having to verbally check in with anyone? Like there has to be somewhere where the key performance indicators, the stats that you need to know that your team is being productive, should be within reach to you as a leader at any given point in time. And if it isn't, it means you need a system to solve for that, not another set of meetings.
This is just not an efficient use of people's time. And certainly I'm not saying we shouldn't encourage cross collaboration and pollination of ideas. I think that's a really great intention behind a meeting. But meeting just to hear everyone's regular status updates is just not a good substitute for quality project management, which requires real leadership and management to say, here are the different checkpoints, here are the benchmarks I'm expecting you to be able to deliver on in the times that I'm expecting to see those results. And here's how we will transfer that information and communicate that information frankly, in writing or in a project management software of some kind, or in some kind of dashboard. Because verbal communication, status update meetings are just the bane of so many people's existence and it is not a good substitute for quality project management.
So I'm not saying that's what all of your team meetings look like, you know, my team meetings over the years have really shifted in terms of duration, content, what actually serves us. But very regularly at Bossed Up, I'm constantly asking the question, is this meeting still of use to us? And if the answer is no, don't be afraid to get rid of it. If it becomes necessary again, down the line, you can always add it back in. Know, I think reading that book a few years ago, The Art of Gathering, How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker, just continues to show up in my life. And Priya Parker makes the point over and over again in her book that no matter whether you're holding a conference, a training, a meeting, or a birthday party or a bridal shower, no meeting can be designed with intention unless the objective of that meeting is clear from the outset. In other words, you have to answer, why we are meeting in order to decide who should be there and what we should do at said meeting. So don't be afraid to be the one to speak up and ask why. I know it's a bold challenge. I know what I'm proposing today is not easy to do. It takes a lot of social capital. And sometimes it's not always safe in your workplace to ask these questions. But if it is, I hope you will. Because if you're the one who's willing to raise your hand and say, why are we doing this? Is there a better way? I guarantee you that the vast majority of other people in that meeting will breathe a sigh of relief and be so happy that you're willing to start this conversation. It is an act of leadership to ask that question.
All right, tell me what you think of this, is over meeting culture plaguing your workplace. Have you found a way to deal with this other than what I've suggested here today? And if you have taken some of these actions, how did they go over? Let's keep the conversation going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group…
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…both of which are linked to in today's show notes at bossedup.org/episode445, that's bossedup.org/episode445. And until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose. And together, let's lift as we climb.
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