Solve Your Team’s Meeting Overload Problem

Is your team’s meeting culture broken? If you sense that meetings have started to create unnecessary friction, it’s probably time to intervene. Start by encouraging your team to adopt a “subtraction” mindset—that is, solving problems by doing less, not more. Ask your employees to actively consider which meetings could be shortened and which could be cut altogether. You might even go so far as starting from a clean slate, purging your team’s calendars for 48 hours to assess which meetings are truly necessary. Once your team has trimmed down its meetings, redesign what’s left to make the best use of that time. Which meetings can be restructured so that fewer people attend? Which can be shortened by moving work to asynchronous communication? Once your team has gone through these steps, the collective calendar will feel a whole lot lighter. Meetings are easier to fix when people do it together—when it feels like a movement, be it in your team, department, or the entire organization.