Can Fewer Meetings Reverse Quiet Quitting? Research Says ‘Yes’
Female professional with long brown hair with her head down on work desk against pink background.
by Lisa Bodell for Forbes
The demand for "zero meetings" has become a bargaining chip for employees considering a job change, according to a new study from software firm Otter.ai and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Participants reported having too many meetings on their calendars, which makes them feel "annoyed" and "frustrated."
In other news…water is wet.
Internal meetings have been a prickly area for more than a decade, but the leverage wielded by employees amid the Mass Resignation should motivate leaders to re-examine this aspect of their organization. As a workplace expert with several books and a TED talk on simplification, “zero meetings” has been my rallying cry for years.
Through the process of researching Why Simple Wins, I found workplace complexity to originate from two sources: the organization itself and individual employees. Organizational complexity relates to industry regulations, as well as the number of people, steps, decisions and data points required to do something meaningful in your company. For example, the number of approvals in your hiring process or the compliance requirements for managing consumer data in the U.K. or South Korea.
Individual complexity, on the other hand, refers to red tape created by one person or a single org. A real-world instance is that VP who holds a five-hour weekly meeting or the business unit with a special knack for PowerPoints containing 200-plus slides.
In your own company, meetings are influenced by organizational culture as well as the individuals who lead and attend them. To root out complexity in meetings that you lead or attend, answer the following six statements with either “Consistently,” “Sometimes,” “Rarely” or “Never.”
1. I spend 20% or less of my time each week in unproductive meetings.