Meetings Are Mushrooming. Harsh Measures May Be Required.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Shopify is serious about cutting down on “meeting creep” — the way meetings seem to proliferate on corporate calendars like mushrooms spreading across a shady lawn.

Earlier, the company axed recurring meetings of three or more people and exhorted employees to keep Wednesdays meeting-free. Now, the Ottawa-based e-tailer has integrated a meeting-cost calculator into its calendar app.

When an employee tries to schedule a gathering of three or more people, a little red price tag pops up, estimating the cost based on the size of the meeting, its duration and the average salary of the employees invited. “A typical 30-minute endeavor with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600” depending on role and seniority, report my Bloomberg colleagues Mia Gindis and Matthew Boyle, and adding an executive can send the cost soaring over $2,000.

Elements of Shopify’s meeting cull could backfire — maybe it’s not a good idea to remind meeting schedulers of how highly paid some executives are. Moreover, notes Benjamin Laker, a professor at Henley Business School in the UK, it’s “important to remember that the value of a meeting is not only defined by its length or the number of attendees, but also by the productivity and the quality of the interactions.” But on balance, Shopify’s experiment is a worthy one. 

According to Laker and his colleagues, the highest and best uses of meetings are to assign work to the team; clarify policies or goals with employees; and discuss with employees which projects are going well and which need to change. Those types of conversations are well worth the cost. But too many meetings simply focus on disseminating information (that could have been an email); providing status updates (that’s what Slack is for); or providing a deadline to turn in work.

Useless meetings are Enemy No. 1 for employees today. In a Microsoft report from earlier this year, workers said “inefficient meetings” were the primary barrier to getting stuff done. A 2021 survey suggested that employees attended an average of 11-15 meetings a week, with managers and executives attending even more. And another survey found that the average professional spends half of his or her time in meetings — a significant rise from only a few years ago.

I suspect there are a few reasons for the rise in meetings. Perhaps part of the shift is a move away from spontaneous conversations and toward planned ones. This mirrors how many of us now communicate — rather than picking up the phone and calling someone, it’s increasingly the norm to send a quick text first: “Good time to chat?” As more of us work from different locations than our colleagues, unplanned discussions become more difficult to pull off.

But that’s not the only reason that meetings have mushroomed. New organizational norms —  flatter structures, more consensus-driven leadership — can make more collaboration necessary. If you can’t make a decision without all the stakeholders in the room, you can’t make a decision without calling a meeting. Old-fashioned, top-down hierarchies might have some downsides, but at least there’s less need to pull everyone together. Want a decision? Ask the highest-paid person.

Office design also plays a role. In the olden days (at least, so I’m told) when more employees had private offices, it was easier to pull someone into your office for a quick word. Now that so few people — including managers — have any degree of privacy, every delicate conversation becomes a “meeting” with a conference room reserved.

Then there’s the problem of doing too much. When organizational leaders have unrealistic expectations about what can be accomplished or even just avoid making tough calls on which zombie projects to kill, employees get overloaded. And when people are too busy, the surest way to get them to respond is to get on their calendar. Did that meeting need to be a meeting? Not really — but without the fake deadline of a meeting, it can feel impossible to get their attention.

Given all these, shall we say, inflationary pressures on meetings, it makes sense that managers would have to make an active effort to keep the number of confabs down. 

Reminding employees that “time is money” — as Shopify Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian told Bloomberg — is likely to have some drawbacks. Management professors Cassie Mogilner, Ashley Whillans and Michael Norton note in a research review that “when people are led to equate time and money by putting a price on their time … their behavior changes.” They become less helpful, less willing to work on projects that aren’t directly tied to their compensation, feel more stress and may become more impatient. Focusing on money makes people a little more anti-social, in other words — but it can also make them work longer and harder.

Another problem the meeting-cost calculator won’t solve is inefficient meeting scheduling. The problem people have with meetings isn’t always their number — they’re an important part of one’s job — but having them scattered throughout the day in a way that makes a focus on deep work impossible. Ideally, meetings could be clumped together so that everyone had at least a few hours a day when they could concentrate uninterrupted.

Even so, there are benefits to reducing the overall number of meetings. In a survey of 76 companies, Laker and his colleagues found that cutting the number of meetings improved employee productivity, accountability and job satisfaction and reduced workers’ sense of being micromanaged. He says that it is often more practical to designate certain mornings or afternoons as meeting-free, rather than entire days. “Having more time free from meetings is more important than having an entire day without them.” 

Without meetings, workers took charge of their own to-do lists. Cooperation increased as workers connected one-on-one, either in person or via Slack, email or videoconference. There were also fewer misunderstandings, since people could refer back to Slack messages to see what was decided, rather than misremembering a (perhaps vague) conclusion to an in-person meeting.

That’s not to say that all meetings are bad. Too few meetings can be as bad as too many, the researchers say — the sweet spot is probably limiting meetings to 1-2 days a week. If a meeting-cost calculator is what’s needed to get down to that level, it’s a calculation that will pay off.

More From Sarah Green Carmichael at Bloomberg Opinion:

• Email Isn’t a Nuisance, It’s Your Job
• Workplace Friendships Are Worth the Awkwardness
• Amazon CEO’s Scary Meetings Make Sense

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Sarah Green Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor. Previously, she was managing editor of ideas and commentary at Barron’s and an executive editor at Harvard Business Review, where she hosted “HBR IdeaCast.”

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