A 5 step plan you can use to implement a no-meeting day in your organization
You’re not imagining it, we’re all having too many meetings.
The average knowledge worker spends 23 hours a week in meetings. Since shifting to remote and hybrid working, meetings have steadily increased in duration and frequency, with people attending 13 percent more meetings than they were before. A growing body of research is reporting that spending the majority of your workday in meetings negatively affects psychological, physical, and mental well-being.
Even before the pandemic, managers thought meetings were often a poor use of people’s time. In 2017, Harvard Business School surveyed 182 senior managers across multiple industries and found:
· 71% said meetings were unproductive and inefficient
· 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work
· 64% said team meetings come at the expense of deep thinking
· 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring their teams closer together
Many organizations are adopting no-meeting days
One obvious solution, popular with big companies including Facebook, Asana, and Atlassian, is to ban meetings one or more days a week. It’s a common-sense tactic and has been pushed by productivity gurus for years, well before the remote work revolution.
The question is, do no-meeting days work? Do they actually have a positive impact on productivity and well-being? Or simply lead to overscheduling on the designated meeting days.
Impact of no-meeting days
In a study recently published by MIT, researchers surveyed 76 companies each with more than 1,000 employees and operations in more than 50 countries, who had introduced one or more no-meeting days per week.
The researchers interviewed managers in each company and looked at data on productivity, engagement, and collaboration from both before and after the no-meeting policies went into effect.
Never has the impact of no-meeting days been assessed across such a large sample of companies. And the impact is dramatic:
· When companies banned meetings 1 day per week, productivity rose by 35%
· When companies banned meetings 2 days per week, productivity rose by 71%
· When companies banned meetings 3 days per week, productivity rose by 73%
Autonomy, communication, engagement, and satisfaction all improved markedly as well, while micromanaging and stress decreased.
Why do no-meeting days have such an impact on productivity?
While these results are striking, it’s important to reflect on why this might be the case. My suspicion is that having too many meetings disrupts workers during their most productive hours, preventing them from getting into flow.
Establishing a meeting free day could reduce the context switching that can slow down dedicated project work. You no longer need to spend ten minutes prepping for a meeting before winding down, switching subjects, and prepping for your next meeting. You get your focus back and you simply work.
There is such a thing as too few meetings
While the research clearly shows that reducing meetings can boost productivity, there are also negative consequences from not holding enough meetings.
The research revealed that the advantages of no-meeting periods begin to plateau after meetings are reduced by 60%, and significantly decrease beyond that. From this point, satisfaction, productivity, engagement, and cooperation all declined.
While every organization needs to consider what will work for their unique circumstances, based on the research the optimum solution is to have three meeting free days, leaving two days per week available for meetings. This ensures weekly schedules are managed, the work that’s needed gets done, and social connections are maintained.
A five-step plan for implementing a no-meeting day policy
If you haven’t already implemented a no-meeting day (or three) a week, you should seriously consider giving it a try. But implementing such a policy is far from straightforward, especially for large organizations where you don’t have complete control of your diary. It can feel completely unrealistic.
But Facebook employs nearly 72,000 people. If they can do it I suspect your organization can to. If like me, you’d love to give this a try but it feels totally unrealistic for your organization, the following five steps can help you, which I’ve used to get my organization to trial a no-meeting day policy for the next three months:
1) Get buy-in: People tend to resist change, especially when it’s imposed on them without discussion. Before implementing a no-meeting day policy present your proposal to your team and ask for their feedback. Make sure they feel part of the change and can see the rewards if they are willing to try working differently.
2) Set up as a trial: Start by establishing your no-meeting day as a trial to test if the setup works well in your organization and give your team a chance to adapt.
3) Retrain others: Discuss the idea of your trial with adjacent teams, clients, and your boss. Make clear the organizational benefits you’re seeking, and what people can expect of you during your no-meeting hours in terms of communication. In particular when you will (or won’t be available on email and instant messaging platforms)
4) Have a strategy for dealing with unplanned meetings: You will inevitably receive requests to meet on your no-meeting days, and you need to have a plan for these requests. Based on the hours you’re most productive I suggest splitting your day into two four-hour blocks 08:00 am-12:00 am and 1:00 pm-5:00 pm. Based on when you’re most productive, mentally agree with yourself which of these blocks is sacred and which you will allow ad-hoc meetings into.
You’ll need to make a judgment call on which meetings you accept — if it’s your boss who understands the situation and still insists on a meeting you may have to go with it. But for colleagues and direct reports, you likely can reschedule meetings for a time that works well for you.
5) Evaluate and adapt: Once your trial is over, it’s important to validate your initial assumptions with your team. Begin by surveying the team to determine whether you achieved the productivity and morale benefits you were hoping for. Then discuss the results with your team, and ask them for any changes they would recommend to make the most of a continued no-meeting day policy.
Parting thoughts
No one goes to work to spend the majority of their time in meetings — the majority of which appear to be unproductive! We go to work to create something, achieve an organizational mission, to learn, and grow.
The facts don’t lie, the advantages of meeting free days are numerable: productivity increases, collaboration increases, stress decreases.
Productivity and morale suffer when you’re constantly being interrupted. Take a day off from meetings, emails, and calls — your team will thank you.
