Excessive meetings have become a common complaint in the modern workplace, as they can take time away from work that needs to be done. Leadership teams, in particular, can find themselves bogged down with meetings, leaving little time for strategic thinking and execution.
Here, 20 Forbes Human Resources Council members share practical strategies to help leadership teams cut down on unnecessary meetings—both among themselves and with their direct reports. By following these tips, leaders can refocus their time on critical tasks and drive their organizations toward success.
1. Put Information In An Email
A simple rule of thumb: If the meeting agenda can be covered via an email exchange or another written communication method, do it and give the time back to yourself and your team. – Janet Vardeman, Avanade
2. Establish Expectations For Focused Work Hours
Leadership should cultivate an environment that champions productivity over prolonged meetings. It’s imperative to emphasize efficient communication and result-driven collaboration. Set clear expectations for focused work hours, promoting team autonomy and trust. Encourage leaders to lead by example, valuing outcomes over unnecessary face time. – Cally Stanphill, PainTEQ LLC
3. Hold Meetings Only When You Need A Defined Outcome
Limit your meetings to ones where you are looking to achieve a defined outcome. How? Design your meetings by clearly communicating the desired outcome to peers and subordinates and specifying the what, the why and the how. Empower the overall team with tasks and be clear on deadlines. – Elisabetta Bartoloni, Heidrick & Struggles
4. Invest In Communication And Collaboration Tools
Leverage and invest in collaborative tools and communication platforms, such as Easy Retro, Asana, Slack and so on. These platforms encourage and enable real-time communication, file sharing and project tracking and can aid in streamlining information sharing. By centralizing discussions and documents, teams can stay informed without the need for frequent meetings. – Jade Nikolaou, SecondMuse
5. Determine Necessity Of Current Meetings
Get in the practice of doing regular and honest assessments and inventory of currently scheduled meetings to understand what is their purpose and what are you trying to accomplish during the meetings. If the topics require a meeting, great, if not, find alternative ways to get things accomplished so you can free up time to get work done and reduce meeting fatigue. – Oksana Lukash, Avid Bioservices
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6. Reevaluate Current Communication Methods
Rethinking methods of communication can improve the quality and efficiency of interactions between managers and direct reports. Staying aligned and giving feedback and recognition doesn’t have to involve time-consuming meetings. These essential conversations and communications can take place in the flow of work, cutting down on time spent in meetings and leaving more time to tackle other work. – Jamie Aitken, Betterworks
7. Make Sure Each Meeting Has A Purpose, Agenda And Call To Action
Effective meetings are not excessive; ineffective meetings are. Effective meetings have a purpose, an agenda and a call to action. Every person invited to a meeting with these three critical components must be able to actively contribute to them. If a scheduled meeting does not have any of these three items, the leader’s responsibility is to correct that deficiency or cancel the meeting. – David Hawthorne, Pacific Bells
8. Promote Purposeful Communication
Create a shared understanding of what effective meetings look like, and bring purpose and awareness to the other methods of communication found throughout the organization. Many meetings could be accomplished through email, slack, teams or other collaboration and productivity tools. Set a clear expectation of how to leverage each channel and champion the practice of purposeful communication. – Matthew Brown, Schoox
9. Create A ‘No Meetings’ Day
To free up work time, companies should consider instituting a “no meetings” day of the week, recording meetings for replay at a later time or rotating team member attendance so no single individual is over-committed. – Hugo Malan, Kelly
10. Put A Limit On Meetings
Meetings are important and necessary, but they’re ancillary to actual work. Employers should take a top-down approach to rejecting the notion that the organization’s principal product is meetings. Start by putting a limit on them. In turn, employees should also be empowered to decline meetings during the workday hours when they’re typically most productive and work uninterrupted. – Graham Glass, CYPHER LEARNING
11. Create Set Hours For Meetings And Outreach
Establishing core business hours is key to not only balancing meetings and productivity time but also supporting flexibility in the workplace. For example, if 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. are the hours that people are expected to be available for outreach and meetings, that gives employees the autonomy to establish their schedule around that to accommodate their lives outside of work and get their work done. – Halai Shukran, Pluribus Digital
12. Ensure Every Person Included In The Meeting Has A Purpose
Be intentional about every meeting scheduled, not only about the agenda and who is invited but also about whether the meeting needs to happen at all. Every employee in a meeting should be able to clearly articulate a purpose for being there. If there is no clear answer, their attendance might be unnecessary. Sometimes, a meeting can even be replaced by a thorough email. – Niki Jorgensen, Insperity
13. Build A Stance On Limited Meetings Into Your Culture
Establishing a company culture that supports limited meetings is key. Restricting formal meeting times to a couple of conferences a month helps team members take those meetings seriously. In turn, meetings are more productive and focused on items requiring in-depth conversation rather than on items that could be resolved via email or a text thread in the team’s project management application. – Laura Spawn, Virtual Vocations, Inc.
14. Reduce Meetings Altogether
Reduction in meetings needs to be a cultural shift. All executives and leaders need to buy into a consistent strategy and make it an organizational initiative. This might include limiting meetings to certain days and times or requiring meetings to be conducted within certain time frames, such as 20 minutes or 45 minutes only. This gives people time back in their day and keeps meetings on target. – Lindsey Garito, Westchester Country Club
15. Evaluate The Cost Of The Meeting
The meeting members or senior management must be aware of the meeting cost—the time taken from each employee and their respective cost—and analyze it to understand the impact of those investments. Once they are made aware of the meeting cost and their impact on business, there will be a change in avoiding meetings that are not adding value to the business. – Prakash Raichur, Taghleef Industries
16. Establish Regular Communication And Be Open To Feedback
Leadership should be in regular communication with their teams and be open to feedback, such as meetings are excessive. They should evaluate their agendas, determine what they need to cover and prioritize meetings based on that. If there are topics that can wait or can be discussed over email or instant message, then they should focus on their top priorities and allow their teams time to work. – Erin ImHof, CertiK
17. Eliminate Redundancy In Meeting Agendas
Take a step back and review meeting agendas to look for areas of redundancy—not just redundancy with other meetings, but in areas where the communication happening in the meeting has already been shared. In doing so, you don’t want to just consider eliminating meetings but also look for opportunities to shorten the length of meetings, giving employees more time to perform work. – Lisa Shuster, iHire
18. Cancel Recurring Meetings When You Can
Normalize canceling recurring meetings when they don’t serve you or your team that day or week. Often, we feel pressured to go through the motions of our usual stand-ups or check-ins, even when we have nothing to say or are underwater. As leaders, simply saying we need the time back can help others to feel comfortable also saying, “This week, this meeting is unnecessary.” – Ursula Mead, InHerSight
19. Limit Meetings To Certain Times A Day And Record Optional Meetings To Distribute
First, managers may choose to limit meetings to only certain times of day. Early mornings, late afternoons and lunchtime can be blocked off to allow employees to tend to their own schedules. Second, virtual meetings that are optional can be recorded and the link distributed to team members. This way, employees can watch during their downtime without it interfering with their daily business. – John Feldmann, Insperity
20. Establish ‘Focused Work’ Days, Limit Hourly Quotas For Meetings And Set Meeting Agendas Upfront
Follow three key strategies: 1. Establish non-meeting “focused work” days throughout the firm; 2. Limit weekly hourly quotas for meetings; 3. any meeting should have an agenda set as questions and should be sent upfront. Oftentimes, such agendas are addressed before the meeting making the meetings non-necessary. – Nick Frey, Avomind
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