Leadership Hacks, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6Team meetings

One of the biggest workplace challenges is finding time to complete your work and attend meetings. With the increase in digital technology and the use of email for communicating information and collaborating, you'd expect that the number of meetings would have decreased. With traditional face‐to‐face meetings and virtual meetings, research shows the opposite.

According to a 2017 Harvard Business Review article by Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun, many executives are now spending as many as 23 hours per week in meetings and 65 per cent of managers said meetings kept them from completing their own work. During the pandemic, Microsoft found that weekly meeting time more than doubled for Microsoft Teams users. Even during the global pandemic, research by Guru found that almost half of respondents stated that 40 per cent or more of the time spent on video conference calls was unproductive and wasteful. These are shocking statistics — and the trend is growing.

So why has the number of meetings increased? I believe there are several reasons.

• A broader perspective. Almost everyone would agree that having more minds working on a particular issue provides a broader viewpoint in less time. Face‐to‐face meetings gather the collective knowledge of numerous people simultaneously, which gives the person tasked with solving a problem or making a decision many insights. This can increase the depth of understanding around a specific issue, tapping ...