The meeting plague - the destruction of working time through meetings

Created: 05/26/2022, 20:12

Complaints about unnecessary meetings have become louder during the corona pandemic.

Scientists go even further and even see a danger for companies in the video call wave.

Munich/Hamburg - Managers and employees spend an increasing part of their working hours in meetings - with potentially damaging consequences for companies and the motivation of the workforce.

Scientists and management consultants assume that the corona pandemic has promoted the long-term trend of a steadily growing number of meetings in many companies.

Meetings: Inefficient meetings not only eat up time

The damage caused by inefficient meetings can go well beyond just wasting time.

"The frequency of meetings has increased steadily in recent years, also as a result of increasing organizational complexity," says Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock, Professor of Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the University of Hamburg.

There is no question that meetings are necessary and useful: "They are always needed, for example, when problems need to be solved together, processes need to be coordinated or readjusted, or when a crisis needs to be responded to," says the scientist.

"The latter naturally also applies to the corona pandemic." Due to the increased work in the home office, the number of shorter meetings and one-to-one meetings in particular has increased - due to a lack of other interaction options.

Video meetings further increase inefficiencies

"There are a few trends that have caused meetings to become inefficient during the Corona crisis," says Philipp Kolo, HR expert at the Boston Consulting Group * (BCG).

“Bringing more people into a meeting is very easy in a video conference.

That has advantages, but it also requires much more stringency in meeting management.” Frequent complaints: too many participants, superfluous requests to speak, a lack of structure.

"There are managers who spend 80 to 90 percent of their working hours in meetings," says Kolo.

"That's not efficient, because they're also supposed to work on content and need time for their teams."

Power struggles often overshadow meetings

A more or less open secret in many companies is that in-house politics, power and authority wrangling play at least as great a role as the actual topic of the meetings.

"A manager does not have to drag the entire staff of employees to a meeting, because either the manager can make a decision himself or delegate the decision to an employee," says Kolo.

“This is also a security issue in many companies.

The more participants a meeting has, the more responsibilities are distributed.”

Calculating the exact follow-up costs is naturally difficult.

But that inefficient meetings are expensive is undisputed: "The estimates of wasted costs due to ineffective meetings vary somewhat in the literature, but are a recognized and far-reaching problem in research," says Professor Lehmann-Willenbrock.

US scientists: Even bosses are annoyed by meetings

It is by no means just ordinary employees who find meetings tormenting, but also their bosses.

In 2017, the three US scientists Leslie Perlow, Constance Hadley and Eunice Eun published their article "Stop the Meeting Madness" in the Harvard Business Review: 65 percent of the 182 senior managers surveyed complained that meetings kept them from work.

"The lack of return on investment in meetings affects executives in particular, since they spend a lot of working time in different meetings and at the same time generate higher personnel costs," says Professor Lehmann-Willenbrock.

However, as we have shown in our research, "wobbly" meetings are also detrimental to the psychological well-being and engagement of individual employees."

BCG HR expert Kolo says: “It is important to structure the meeting, reduce the number of participants and limit the time.

And: That it is very clear what each participant can and should contribute.” At the end of the meeting, the to-dos should be defined, including responsibilities and schedule.

Meetings: Amazon relies on the two-pizza rule

The consultant refers to the large US tech companies, known in the corporate world for their strict guidelines.

One example is the "Two Pizza Teams" that are common at Amazon*.

A working group and its meetings should not have more members than can be fed by two pizzas.

"With more than ten people, experience has shown that the planning process loses effectiveness, quality and productivity," says a spokeswoman for Amazon Germany.

An Amazon meeting usually lasts between 45 and 60 minutes, and the time should be strictly adhered to.

The first step is to read a previously prepared, maximum six-page document together so that everyone is on the same page.

The good news for desperate boardrooms: Sometimes very simple steps are enough to combat the proliferation of meetings in middle management and staff: "Some companies clear the chairs out of their meeting rooms and put high tables in," says BCG consultant Kolo.

"Then there will be no more meetings where people sit, drink coffee and eat biscuits."