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Key points
- Although collaboration can have great benefits, it also can be exhausting and distracting if overused.
- Most employees report being overwhelmed by meetings; however, leaders underestimate the number of employees that feel this way.
- Managers can help employees by establishing meeting-free time, refining who needs to be included in conversations, and addressing Zoom fatigue.
In 1996, the CEO of Motorola explained at a conference that there was no longer a place in his company for an engineer that could not work in teams. Nearly 10 years later, Steve Jobs pronounced on "60 Minutes" that “great things in business are never done by one person; they’re done by a team of people.”
Today, the gospel of collaboration has been cemented into most workplaces. Although collaboration can have great benefits for employees and organizations, it also can be exhausting and distracting if overused or inappropriately used.
One of the most common collaboration tools in the workplace is meetings. However, the amount of collaboration that actually gets done in many meetings is questionable. At the extreme, some workers lament that they are in “meeting hell,” with genuine collaboration being replaced with constant get-togethers. Indeed, a recent survey confirmed that more than two-thirds of employees believe that meetings interfere with their ability to get their work done.
Whereas most employees report being overwhelmed by constant meetings and collaboration at work, leaders underestimate the number of employees that feel this way by nearly 50 percent. To help better understand this issue and get their teams back on track, managers can establish meeting-free time, consider who actually needs to be included in conversations, and fight Zoom fatigue.
Establish Meeting-Free Time
Research has shown that companies with the lowest revenue tend to fall into two groups: those who have the fewest meetings and those who have the most meetings. In other words, companies need to find the sweet spot where information is flowing between employees but where schedules are not overcrowded.
Recent evidence suggests that the ideal balance is stacking meetings on two days a week, leaving three meeting-free days. Whereas many companies may find this ideal daunting and hard to imagine, the idea of establishing meeting-free days does not need to be done all at once. Just establishing one meeting-free day a week has incredible benefits: An examination of 76 companies with more than 1,000 employees demonstrated that reducing meetings by 20 percent, or the equivalent of establishing one meeting-free day a week, improved productivity by 35 percent, increased cooperation by 15 percent, reduced stress by 26 percent, and ultimately improved employee happiness by 48 percent.
Consider Who Actually Needs to Be Included in the Conversation
When meeting invites are sent, hosts often err on including more people rather than fewer. Although the intention is often to be inclusive of anyone with a potential stake, recipients frequently hesitate to decline meeting invites even if they feel their attendance won’t make an impact. As a result, meetings are often attended by too many people.
To fight this problem, Jeff Bezos implemented the “two-pizza team rule” at Amazon, where the number of people working together should be able to be fed by two pizzas. Supporting this idea, research has identified that when employees work together, there is often a “strategic core” within the group that represents a subset of key people who have an outsized impact on the team’s performance.
Those hosting meetings can benefit from considering who is the “strategic core” for their meeting, or, in other words, who actually needs to be included in the conversation.
Fight Zoom Fatigue
For many years, research has shown that employees who attend more meetings feel more exhausted. However, with the increasing use of virtual meetings, there is another layer of exhaustion plaguing attendees: Zoom fatigue. Because most companies will continue to have virtual meetings to some extent, organizations can benefit from minimizing the exhaustion that can accompany virtual meetings.
One recent study found that there is a simple solution to reducing Zoom fatigue and consequently getting people more engaged in virtual meetings: not requiring the camera to be turned on during all meetings. More generally, because employees often find constant virtual meetings more exhausting than meetings in other formats, managers can benefit from considering other formats when appropriate, such as the phone or email.
In conclusion, it is deeply engrained in many modern workplaces that “teamwork makes the dream work.” However, that dream can quickly turn into a nightmare when true collaboration is replaced by an influx of meetings. Through taking steps to remedy collaboration overload, leaders may be surprised at how reducing meetings can encourage true collaboration.
