Meeting overload
A state in which the number or length of meetings in an organization becomes excessive and squeezes working time, eroding decision quality and employee engagement.
Meeting overload is a state in which the number or length of meetings in an organization becomes excessive and squeezes the time for actual work. In the telemetry data of Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index report (2022), the average Teams user’s weekly meeting time had increased by 252% compared with February 2020, making it a structural problem across the industry. Meeting overload is not simply a matter of time; it erodes both the quality of an organization’s decision-making and employee engagement.
Typical symptoms of meeting overload
The structural causes of meeting overload
- Accountability turned into ritual: recurring meetings multiply for reporting progress to managers
- Putting off decisions: “let’s decide at the next meeting” chains on and on
- A culture of inviting everyone involved: “invite them just in case” becomes the norm
- Ignoring the cost of calling meetings: the person calling the meeting bears no financial / time burden
- Undervaluing asynchronous communication: trying to resolve everything in synchronous meetings
The organizational cost of meeting overload
An estimate by Bain & Company analyzing time data from large companies (Harvard Business Review, 2014) reported that 15% of an organization’s total working hours were spent in meetings, and that for senior executives more than 2 days a week were filled with meetings of 3 or more people. Because meetings become a larger chunk of personnel costs the higher the position, practicing meeting cost calculation as an organization reveals what to cut.
Organizational approaches to resolving meeting overload
Examples from companies that adopted them
- Shopify: deleted about 12,000 recurring meetings across the company at once and introduced “no-meeting Wednesdays” and a meeting cost calculator (2023)
- Asana: in an initiative called “Meeting Doomsday,” took stock of all recurring meetings at once and re-registered only the ones that were needed
- Google Calendar: secures buffers between back-to-back meetings with the 25/50-minute “speedy meetings” setting
Dealing with meeting overload at the individual level
Before the organization acts, there are many measures individuals can take. The starting point is an active stance of protecting your own calendar, such as setting a meeting cap, preventing back-to-back meetings, and handling sudden requests. Once you get into the habit of declining, those making requests also become more planned.
Solving it by going asynchronous
The fundamental solution to meeting overload is to narrow synchronous meetings to topics that can only be handled that way and to move everything else to asynchronous communication. Fully remote companies such as GitLab, Buffer, and Automattic follow this policy thoroughly and keep recurring meetings to a minimum. Knowing when to use asynchronous communication is the key.