This is not another blog about meeting effectiveness

"People have 250 percent more meetings every day than they did before the pandemic,"

- Mary Czerwinski, the research manager of the Human Understanding and Empathy group at Microsoft.

Do you have a "work night" after your work day?
It turns out many of us do.

One of the things I still get asked about most often is how to make team meetings better and more productive. It's something every organization can continuously improve upon. Here is the question I always ask: Why are you having the meeting in the first place?

(No, seriously. Why are you having it? If you haven't done a meeting audit to understand exactly what the objective is of every meeting on your calendar (especially the recurring ones) and why your presence is required, stop reading this and go do that right now!)

We are on meeting overload. A 250% increase, really?!? According to this fantastic article from The Atlantic, there is a bump in work activity right before bedtime that is so noticeable that they are calling it the "third peak", as in the third peak in productivity for the white-collar workforce.

Honestly, this makes me sad. And, a little mad.

It's one thing if an individual chooses to log on because something pulled them away during the day or if they are on a deadline, but if it is happening so consistently across industries and companies that it's noticeable (courtesy of Microsoft), this is a problem. This is a problem for leaders who have team members who are stressed from working like this. And, this is a problem for you and your physical and mental health if this is happening for longer than a season.

The good news? It's all fixable.

"At a deep level, meeting inflation is about the outdated expectation that all office work ought to be synchronous, or happening at the same time for everyone. Meetings require synchronicity:
Everybody be present now.

But most white-collar labor can be at least somewhat asynchronous. We send emails and chats that don’t require an immediate response. We edit and share documents without the expectation that our colleagues will attend to our work in a matter of milliseconds.

Good remote managers should be time ninjas, continually deciding what work must be synchronous (meetings) and what work can be asynchronous (emails or shared docs)."

- Derek Thompson, This is What Happens When There Are Too Many Meetings, The Atlantic

If your team needs some support to do a reset around your meetings and how you are working together, I can help. I regularly conduct "Meeting Dynamics" reviews for organizations to help understand what are the values (and sometimes, the gaps) that drive the meeting culture. I'd love to help you eliminate the "third peak" in your team!