Reducing Meeting Overload

Question

Hello HackerNews,Our company is drowning in meetings , and we're looking for insights to reduce this overload. Have any of you successfully tackled this issue in your organizations? We're intrigued by Spotify's approach of canceling all meetings with more then two attendees, and rebooking only when necessary. What strategies, tools, or initiatives have worked for you?Share your experiences and tips on managing meetings effectively!Thanks,

sf4lifer · Accepted Answer

I went through extreme zoom overload as a senior leader at a large organization. I found myself on upwards of 16 Zooms a day. It was exhausting and I felt not very productive. I found most people were multi-tasking and just waiting for their turn to talk. There were also people who just hid on meetings all day every day instead of producing work. I've since switched entirely to async audio messages. You get far more context and discussion than text based chat. Teams/slack already have audio messaging built-in. Why wait until everyone is on a meeting to discuss something. Instead just start talking and people will respond when they can. I've reduced my synchronous meetings to a couple a week. Disclaimer: I built Airwave a push to talk app for frontline workers and use that exclusively.

weitzj · Answer

Mandate everybody to delete their calendars each quarter. Only allow to schedule meeting s on specific workdays. Cancel the meeting if the agenda is not set or people are not prepared

frans · Answer

Switch to async meetings like gitlab [1] does.
Disclosure: I am the author of NoFaceMeeting.com, a tool to set up and manage async meetings. Read more about typical objections and possible answers here [2]
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/asynchro...
[2] https://nofacemeeting.com/blog/typical-objections