Are you experiencing Zoom fatigue?
80-million meetings per day! That’s an estimate of how many meetings are being held- just in the United States alone. ¹
On average, meetings within companies and organizations went from seven per month before the pandemic to 12 during the pandemic.
Are we having too many meetings? Maybe, especially when there’s no clear agenda or people don’t stick to it. Are the topics content worthy?
Estimates show that about 70% of meetings keep employees from working and completing all their tasks. Ineffective meetings that waste our time can negatively impact psychological, physical, and mental well-being.
On average, meetings take up nearly half of our work week. According to Microsoft, since the pandemic began, the number of meetings has jumped to 153%. ²
Some surveys show that employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%, making employees feel more empowered and autonomous. They owned their to-do lists and held themselves accountable, which consequently increased their satisfaction by 52%. The question becomes, does everyone need to be involved in the meeting?
A company we all know, Shopify, put a moratorium on meetings that included more than two people, giving back their time. “Companies are for builders, not managers.” ²
Our meetings should focus on three things: clients, expectations, and productivity levels.
- To review work that’s occurred (what worked or didn’t and why)
- To clarify and validate something (policies, team goals, etc.)
- To distribute work appropriately among your team
Being judicious about which meetings add value and which don’t will help free up people’s calendars. Note to self: Strategy garners loyalty towards managers.
Your teams are full of talented and capable people doing what they do best, but they need space to do so. By better understanding how they want to work together, how meetings fit into that, and where meetings do and don’t add value, you’ll minimize the need for useless meetings.
Looking on the brighter side
One of the positive impacts of zoom that we experienced in the senior services industry is that for virtual meetings among families who are scattered throughout the country, it did add significant value and encouraged the family unit to foster collaboration for everyone!
It improved efficiency of having the conversation once while at the same time giving an opportunity for questions to be asked and answered so that everyone could be part of the equation and the decision-making process in a collective way! Many of the larger families found it to be more cost effective as well by eliminating the need to pay for flights for multiple visits. Instead they were able to plan to be in town for the more important events, such as moving a parent into our community. On the flip side, it also enabled us to talk with the perspective resident who may be living out of town at the current time. In some cases, flying with a parent is not an easy option and some have opted to drive them back to Ohio. Scheduling virtual visits is the best solution!
References¹ Lucid Meetings 2 CBS Sunday