Fewer, Better Meetings: How to Audit Your Team's Meeting Load

Meetings rarely get added all at once. A weekly check-in starts during a busy project, a status call gets a few more invitees, a "quick sync" becomes permanent, and a year later the calendar is full of rituals nobody chose on purpose.

The drift is well documented at the top of organizations. In a July 2017 Harvard Business Review article, Leslie Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley and Eunice Eun reported that executives spend "an average of nearly 23 hours a week" in meetings, "up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s." Your team's numbers may be very different, but the pattern of slow accumulation is familiar to almost everyone.

A meeting audit is a deliberate, periodic look at every recurring meeting your team holds, with the goal of keeping the useful ones, improving the weak ones and ending the rest. Here is a practical way to run one.

Signs it is time for an audit

You probably need an audit if several of these sound familiar:

• People do their "real work" early in the morning, in the evening or on weekends.
• Recurring meetings continue after the project that created them has ended.
• The same update is given in more than one meeting each week.
• Invitees regularly multitask, keep cameras off and say nothing.
• Meetings end without a decision or a clear next step.

Step 1: Inventory every recurring meeting

Start with facts. List each recurring meeting with its name, owner, frequency, length, number of attendees and stated purpose. Most calendar tools make this easy to pull together in a spreadsheet.

Then calculate person-hours, which is the meeting length multiplied by the number of attendees. For example, imagine a 10-person design agency with a 60-minute Monday meeting attended by eight people. That one meeting costs eight person-hours a week, or roughly 400 person-hours over a 50-week year. Seeing that number next to each meeting changes the conversation quickly.

Add one more column: "When did this meeting last produce a decision or change what someone did?" If nobody can remember, that is useful information.

Step 2: Ask attendees, not just organizers

Organizers are not the most reliable judges of their own meetings. In a 2019 Harvard Business Review article, Steven Rogelberg described research showing that leaders rate their own meetings much more favorably than the people who attend them.

So run a short anonymous survey for each recurring meeting. Keep it to a few questions:

1. How valuable is this meeting for your work? (1 to 5)
2. Could you get what you need from it in writing instead?
3. Is the length right, too long or too short?
4. Do you need to attend, or just see the outcome?
5. What one change would make it better?

The answers matter for more than efficiency. In a 2006 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Rogelberg and colleagues found that the relationship between meeting time demands and employee well-being depended on factors including task interdependence and the quality of the meeting experience, and that perceived meeting effectiveness had a strong, direct relationship with job attitudes and well-being. In plain terms: a meeting load that suits people whose work is tightly connected can weigh heavily on people whose work is not, and poor meetings hurt more than good ones help.

Step 3: Sort each meeting into one of five decisions

With the inventory and survey results in hand, sort every meeting:

• Keep: clearly valuable, well run and well attended by the right people.
• Shrink: valuable, but too long, too frequent or with too many invitees.
• Change the format: the purpose is real but the method is wrong, such as a status meeting that could become a written update with a short discussion only when needed.
• Replace: move the purpose into a shared document, chat channel or dashboard.
• End: the purpose has expired. Thank people and cancel the series.

Make these decisions together with the team where you can. People accept changes to shared time more readily when they helped make them, and attendees often know which meetings could quietly disappear.

Step 4: Redesign the meetings you keep

For the meetings that survive, small design changes add up.

Shorten the default length. Rogelberg, writing in MIT Sloan Management Review in May 2020, advised: "Don't hesitate to schedule just 15, 20, or 25 minutes for a meeting."

Consider standing for quick meetings. In a 1999 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology, Allen Bluedorn, Daniel Turban and Mary Sue Love compared 56 five-member groups that met standing with 55 five-member groups that met seated. Sit-down meetings were 34% longer than stand-up meetings but produced no better decisions. It was a single experiment, so treat it as a reason to try the format, not a law. And make sure anyone who needs to sit can do so comfortably.

Trim the invitation list so it includes only people who hold information, make the decision or will carry out the result. Others can read the notes.

Give every remaining meeting an agenda built around questions and a clear owner. That alone often reveals whether the meeting has a purpose.

Step 5: Protect blocks of focus time

Cutting meetings frees time only if that time stays free. Some organizations go further and set meeting-free days. In a January 2022 MIT Sloan Management Review article, Benjamin Laker, Vijay Pereira, Pawan Budhwar and Ashish Malik described a survey of 76 large companies, each with more than 1,000 employees, that had introduced one to five meeting-free days a week during the previous 12 months. The authors reported that employees described more autonomy and cooperation and less stress and micromanagement, and that three meeting-free days a week produced the strongest results in their data.

Keep the context in mind. These were large companies, and the measures were surveys of employees' perceptions. A small team that serves customers all day may not be able to clear entire days. A more realistic start might be one shared afternoon a week with no internal meetings, or a team agreement to keep meetings to certain hours.

Step 6: Make the audit a habit

Meetings creep back. Two simple practices keep the gains:

• Give each new recurring meeting an end date or a review date when it is created, such as "review after six weeks."
• Repeat a lighter version of the audit every quarter or two, using the same spreadsheet so you can see the trend in person-hours.

Share the results with the team, including the hours you collectively got back. That makes the next audit easier to start.

Key takeaways

• Inventory every recurring meeting and calculate person-hours to see the real cost.
• Survey attendees anonymously, because organizers tend to rate their own meetings more favorably.
• Sort each meeting into keep, shrink, change format, replace or end, and decide together.
• Redesign survivors with shorter lengths, smaller invite lists and question-based agendas.
• Protect the time you free up, starting with modest focus blocks, and re-audit regularly.

Sources

• Perlow, Hadley and Eun (Harvard Business Review), Stop the Meeting Madness (July–August 2017)
• Steven G. Rogelberg (Harvard Business Review), Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It (January–February 2019)
• Rogelberg, Leach, Warr and Burnfield (Journal of Applied Psychology), "Not Another Meeting!" Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being? (2006)
• Steven G. Rogelberg (MIT Sloan Management Review), The Surprising Science Behind Successful Remote Meetings (May 21, 2020)
• Bluedorn, Turban and Love (Journal of Applied Psychology), The Effects of Stand-Up and Sit-Down Meeting Formats on Meeting Outcomes (1999)
• Laker, Pereira, Budhwar and Malik (MIT Sloan Management Review), The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days (January 18, 2022)