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In any office, public or private, both types of activities are happening constantly.
The most common form of collective work is ‘meetings’, while individual work is done by the individuals on their own desk without the participation of others. There is an ongoing debate that there are too many meetings and that time for other work is greatly squeezed. A recent article in INSEAD (Link below) states that, “In January, Shopify deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from its staff’s calendars. The e-commerce firm also reinstated a no-meeting Wednesday policy. The idea was not to prevent meetings from happening, but for staff to be intentional about them. In addition, it sent a clear message that it was OK to protect one’s time […] There is a fundamental trade-off between the time that we could spend working – being productive and adding value – and the time that we spend in meetings. However, it’s not that meetings are completely useless. Teams do need them to resolve issues, coordinate work, convey information and even socialise workers”.
In March 1999, Leslie Perlow, then University of Michigan and now Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, published a research paper titled, ‘The Time Famine: Toward a Sociology of Work Time’ which focused on the software developers in a Fortune 500 corporation. The term Time Famine aptly describes the feeling of workers who are gasping for individual, uninterrupted time to work because too many joint discussions (meetings) take away much of their productive time. The feeling becomes more acute because the deadlines for delivering work are always looming large over their heads.
Marketing people are particularly aware of the abundance of meetings and the time famine it creates. A study conducted by Laker et al. in 2022, surveyed 76 companies, and found that by reducing the number of meetings by 40%, increased employees’ productivity by 71%. The study also reported that when meetings were reduced by 60%, collaboration increased by 55%. This study makes important points, one of which is that the meetings do not necessarily promote collaboration. My observation is that meetings promote conflicts while employees own interactions promote collaboration.
Few Take Aways from Leslie Perlow Research
- Effective time use for the group requires that a sufficient number of interactive activities (meetings) occur and that these interactive activities be synchronized so as to achieve consistency in the types of activities group members engage in at any given time.
- These findings should apply to groups in any work setting where the work itself requires the same person to do individual and interactive activities. This is the case in occupations typically characterized as knowledge work, including corporate law, investment banking, and computer programming, as well as many types of management, engineering, and other forms of technical work.
- Rewards for people are linked to their individual performance. When employees see that they are not getting enough time to do their own, individual work, they are likely to get into crisis mode which may worsen their performance.
- Seen from ‘sociology of work’ perspective, one may find that the CEOs need to be on top of all situations, which may translate into constant disruption of employees’ work. Negative effects of constant interruptions outweigh the benefits for the group.
- A similar vicious cycle may exist more generally where work routine requires both individual and interactive work. If the two are not synchronized and balanced, it may lead to time famine situation.
- Managers may be able to create virtuous cycles in place of vicious cycles. Instead of interruptions perpetuating crises, reactive behavior, and long working hours, synchronizing individual work and interactive activities may minimize crises, promote proactive behavior, and may even reduce the demand for long work hours.
Though Perlow discussed the importance and rules for ‘quiet time’ 24 years ago, but these did not endure over time. Presently, with all the technological advances, the firms can track how people work and coordinate.
Here are some recommendations for holding interactive sessions, more commonly known as ‘meetings’. The first two come from Guillaume Roels, the Timken Chaired Professor of Global Technology and Innovation at INSEAD.
- For medium sized groups – the person most representative of the team’s needs should have the authority to call the meeting. The meetings may be called whenever need arises but the balance between ‘individual time’ and ‘meeting time’ must be considered.
- For larger groups – a fixed schedule of meeting works very well. People in larger groups come from multiple departments, A fixed schedule means that announcement for meeting does not need to be made every time, and the attendees can easily adjust their work plans in good time.
- Time spent in meetings must be tracked. Depending upon the function, a time-cap should be applied to the number of hours people shall spend in meetings. People whose main work is with outside parties/ vendors/ regulators etc. must spend minimum time in meetings, otherwise it will impact them and the organization negatively. The examples of these are supply chain, regulatory, and customer services. Production people must be exempted from long meetings, they can have their own internal short meetings to update and resolve matters.
- Update meetings, review meetings, brainstorming sessions, and policy meetings must be labeled, and done in different time scales.
- As a rule, most meetings should be done in the afternoon so that people can get clean morning for their regular work.
- Similarly, a no-meeting day in a week may also be considered. The day can be fixed according to the work schedule. However, the day must not be altered every week.
- Meeting start and end time must be declared and strictly adhered to.
- All meetings must have a clear agenda.
- Participants must respect the time slots allotted to them for presentations.
- The Chair of the meeting is required to keep the discussions on track, discouraging unrelated or irrelevant discussions.
- Refreshments should not be part of the meeting. However, if served, these should not be served during the meeting.
- Fewer, louder participants should not be allowed to hijack the meeting in a way that the others feel alienated; it will hurt the real participation.
Meetings are an essential tool and cannot be avoided. Meetings are highly beneficial when done in the right manner and right spirit. Present state of meetings in corporates leaves much to be desired, and an overhaul of the entire activity is urgently needed.
Concluded.
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