Meeting creep: Stiff measures are being tested out against it

livemint.com:

Shopify wants to cut down on ‘meeting creep’—the way meetings seem to proliferate on corporate calendars like mushrooms across a shady lawn. Earlier, the company axed recurring meetings of three or more people and went in for no-meet Wednesdays. Now, the Ottawa-based e-tailer has integrated a meeting-cost calculator into its calendar app.

If one tries to schedule a gathering of three or more people, a little red price tag pops up, estimating the cost based on the meeting’s size, its duration and average pay of participants. A 30-minute one of three people can run $700-1,600, depending on role and seniority, with executives joining sending it higher. Parts of Shopify’s meeting cull could backfire.

Should meeting schedulers be reminded how highly paid some managers 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 number of attendees, but also by the productivity and quality of interactions." But on balance, it’s a worthy test. According to Laker, meetings are best used to assign work to teams, clarify policies or goals, and discuss which projects are going well or need action. These uses are well worth the cost.

But too many meetings simply focus on information that could have been posted, providing status updates (what Slack is for); or setting deadlines. Useless meetings are Enemy No. 1 today.

In a Microsoft report, workers said “inefficient meetings" were the main barrier to getting stuff done. A 2021 survey suggested that employees attended an average of 11-15 meetings a week, executives even more. Another found that professionals spend half their time in meetings, a big jump.