When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, companies had to adjust how they worked. Those that were able moved to remote working. The company I work for was primarily remote in some areas, but in others, employees still met in large office buildings meaning they had to adjust to working remotely.
Remote tools such as Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and Slack became an instant requirement. If people couldn't all show up in a conference room, they had to communicate somehow. Many organizations increased their virtual meeting frequency to help make up for the lack of in-the-building face time. In doing so, there were "more one-on-ones, more team meetings, virtual happy hours, brainstorming sessions and internal client meetings."1
In addition, popup meetings happen all the time in organizations, where people just pop into someone's office for a quick question or discussion. Those still need to happen, because a full-fledged meeting with the entire team is not necessary to handle a micro-issue that doesn't involve everyone.
A report published in 2020 by "researchers from Harvard Business School and New York University's Stern School of Business shows the average length of meetings has dropped 20% since before the pandemic began. But while meetings have gotten shorter, we're having more of them. The number of meetings increased by 13%, the report found."2
The problem with more meetings? "The more meetings you have stacked up during day, even if they're helpful, that means you are pushing your workday later and later to catch up on the things you need to do coming out of those meetings." So when your schedule is slammed with meetings, you have little time to get anything done, which, unless your job requirement it to ONLY have meetings, means that you are constantly behind or staying late to accomplish your non-meeting work.
What's the solution? Here are a couple of ideas.
Micro-meetings: instead of everyone meeting together, have popup meetings with specific individuals who can answer the question or provide insight. At the company I work for, we use Slack, and they recently introduced a feature called "Huddles." Huddles provides you the ability to bring a whole chat channel, just members of a chat channel, or just an individual into a voice conversation to solve a problem, brainstorm, or just chat. The feature also allows you to do screen sharing. I do micro-meetings all the time with my team using this tool. It's better that setting a up a quick zoom call that you have to send out an invitation.
Have a Meet Free Day: Pick a day of the week and make it a meet-free day. No meetings. I do this with my team on Fridays. No calls. It's a day to relax and get things done. It becomes a "git'er done" day. No one has to see me or talk to me . We catch up on work and deal with quick issues using slack or email. The reality is that video adds a level of complexity to meetings as users try to judge reactions or figure out when to interject. And if it's not part of your role, you can find yourself doing something else while others are talking. And if you forget to turn off the camera, people can and will notice. Which can produce anxiety.
Meeting fatigue is a real thing. So instead of more meetings, find other ways to communicate. Ways that are quick and easy. And by all means, allow your teams to set up a meet-free day. Just allow them to "veg" out, catch up, and get things accomplished.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/success/more-meeting-pandemic-work-from-home/index.html, accessed 11/9/2021
Ibid.