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In April, the work management platform Asana decided to conduct an internal experiment. Workers were asked to assess the value of the time they spent on meetings, and then to delete all recurring meetings with five or fewer participants. They sat with an empty calendar for 48 hours, before adding back in all the meetings they saw as valuable.
“Employees changed them to shorter, unconventional lengths. Thirty minute meetings were cut to 15 minutes, and the cadence was made less frequent,” says Rebecca Hinds, productivity expert at Asana. “The final part of the process was for them to calculate how much time they spent in meetings after the audit.” On average, people saved 11 hours per month, which equates to 17 days over the course of a year, or three and a half weeks, Hinds says.
According to Asana’s survey of over 10,000 employees, 40 percent of workers are spending more time on video calls compared to last year, and 52 percent are multitasking more during meetings. Almost half of the workforce in Britain and Australia, and over a third of Americans end their workday feeling mentally and physically exhausted.
Digital fatigue— the very real exhaustion that comes from too much screen usage—is rising. More than half (52 percent) of American workers were feeling burned out in April 2021, with more than two-thirds (67 percent) feeling this has gotten worse for them over the duration of the pandemic, according to an Indeed study. Those who work virtually are more likely to say burnout has worsened (38 percent).
The attempt to combat digital fatigue has made the move to slash meeting times to just 15 minutes very popular among managers. In July 2021, Berlin-based B2B finance automation platform Monite introduced the 15-minute approach for management personnel, team syncs and problem-solving meetings. Each invite sets out the role of moderator or lead, which rotates regularly, as well as an agenda to mark out the flow of discussion.
It took most of the staff about four or five meetings in this style to get used to it, but Ivan Maryasin, Monite’s CEO and cofounder, has already noticed the benefits. “There’s no more tuning out during Zoom calls, which was a very obvious problem in longer sessions,” he says. “Before, you’d set a one-hour meeting, it’d run over to 80 minutes, and you could see that after 20 minutes, top-level people had already tuned out and moved on to other tasks.”
British software development company Distributed went fully remote during the pandemic and implemented 15-minute meetings soon after. “When you do the maths and realize that a one-hour meeting for eight people equals one full business day, along with serious costs associated with that for a business, these shorter, more focused meetings are a no brainer, especially in the context of hybrid and remote workforces,” says cofounder Callum Adamson.
Although companies are only just jumping on the 15-minute meeting, organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg points out that shorter, more focused meetings are old hat. “This notion of huddles, debriefs, after action reviews, whatever you want to call them, has been a big part of agile frameworks and organizational tactics for decades,” he explains. Rogelberg believes the reignited obsession with quick meets comes from the absence of informal interaction, which pushes leaders to adapt how they manage a remote workforce. To him, the 15-minute slot is just one tool for staying in sync and should not be applied in isolation.
The 15-minute meeting cannot single-handedly solve the problem of overscheduling. Governed by default one-hour Google meetings, and automated apps like Calendly and Doodle, employees stare down the barrel of a day, and often an entire week, that is jam-packed with meetings. Microsoft’s Human Factors Lab found that when workers end one call, only to begin another soon after, stress levels in the brain spike, proving that there is a psychological toll to constantly switching gears. Unless you are the person organizing the meetings in the first place, it is easy for calendars to become unwieldy.
Regardless of the profession, people need to have meaningful blocks of time to engage in deep work and properly engage with tasks. Engagements at regular intervals interrupt that flow and can have negative consequences for productivity and well-being. Some of Rogelberg’s research found that people with blocks of meetings, and blocks of white-space time, would end the day with a greater sense of achievement and satisfaction. The ideal cadence is back-to-back meetings with five- to 10-minute breaks in between, and at least two to three consecutive hours free.
“People’s anxiety around meetings is tied to the notion that they’re relinquishing control of their time to someone else, and looking at a day constantly broken up by meetings amplifies that feeling,” says Rogelberg. Not to mention that a long gap between long sessions is pointless for productivity. Ohio State University findings from 2015 show that people perceive the hour of time before a meeting to be shorter, because they’re anticipating it, which reduces their level of focus.
Namrata Sandhu launched a fully remote climate-tech startup called Vaayu in 2020, and she made 15-minute meetings standard. “I’ve worked in corporate jobs for most of my career, and the reason people got into this scheduling mindset is because diaries are so full, and you have to plan two to three weeks in advance to get everybody in one place,” she says. To mitigate that, Vaayu’s employees are encouraged not to plan far in advance, with a wide-open diary approach enabling more spontaneous collaboration. “The goal is to find and have a chat with people when you need them,” says Sandhu. “Staff have said they find it refreshing to have more time to focus on work.”
Assessing whether each meeting is necessary before you plan it, and even again before you host it, is key if we are to wean ourselves off the all-you-can-eat meeting buffet. Rogelberg suggests agenda framing can help too. “Meeting agenda items should be questions to be answered, not topics,” he says. “If you can’t think of any questions, it’s probably not needed, and by asking, you’re determining who has to be there.”
As companies become more intentional about collaboration approaches, they can complement their 15-minute meeting experiments with a wide range of tactics. Healthtech app Thriva organizes short video updates when teams are working asynchronously and encourages walking meetings to get outside even when hybrid working; ecommerce tech provider Alphagreen Group nudges employees to switch off self-view mode to reduce Zoom fatigue, and the nonprofit search engine Ecosia has no-meeting Tuesdays and Thursdays.
As some businesses take steps toward better meeting cultures, others have gone a step further, and do none at all. Victor Potrel, vice president of platform partnerships at TheSoul Publishing hasn’t had an internal meeting or sent an email for over three years. The digital media company has over 2,500 remote workers across 70 countries, and in 2019, it chose to use only project management tools, digital publishing, instant messaging, and video to communicate asynchronously. “People find it liberating that they can focus on what they’re good at,” says Potrel. “Emails and meetings are old ways of working, so when we tell candidates we use neither in interviews, it’s met with a lot of excitement—they say it’s their dream job.”
Updated 5/5/2022 13:30 ET: This piece has been updated to reflect that TheSoul Publishing has not had an internal meeting for over three years.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
