Why Meetings Are Counterproductive

No matter where you work or who you work for, meetings are an “important” part of the job. There’s only one problem: Meetings are bad for business.

Almost every company in the world conducts meetings. In fact, they rely on them as the main source of transferring information to everyone in the workplace, even the workers that don’t need to be there. Fun.

Essentially, high-level meetings are used to discuss the direction of the company; low-level meetings are used to delegate work. Other meetings are there literally to just fill the gap.

Thats not to say that every meeting held in the word is a waste of time. Im sure you can think of a great meeting that was 100% necessary and productive. But most meetings are disruptive, unnecessary rituals that hurt your company’s bottom line. Don't believe me?‍

Meetings are a distraction‍

Let's say you’ve scheduled a meeting at 10 am and one of your workers is working on a complex problem around 9:45. Rather than keeping her train of thought she now has to shift gears into “meeting mode”. Now, because of the meeting, all of her working momentum is lost, and instead of finishing the project she's forced to attend an unrelated meeting.

A bigger problem is that some workers might actually anticipate the meeting and decide to not try as hard in their work, or worse, not work at all. This would cause a severe dent in the productivity of all your workers across the board.

Try out some of our communication tools for productivity and remote work to limit your number of meetings and increase your productivity. ‍

Meetings wander off topic

No matter how large or small your meetings are, no matter how thoroughly you plan everything, your meetings are still likely to eventually be derailed. And when it does, the entire function’s been lost. The ideal “meeting” is one that stays focused and on topic for its entire duration.

Unfortunately “ideal meetings” are the unicorns of the workplace.

Meetings have unnecessary people

This has to be the point that drives home the fact that meetings are extremely unproductive. Meetings are almost always scheduled with little regard of the people that are actually needed to be in them. The scheduler, usually the boss, will often throw people into a roster even if there's only a small chance that the meeting will be relevant to them or that they'll have something meaningful to contribute.

This means that the number of people involved in the meetings inflates which makes people believe in the misconception that - more minds equal more opportunities to solve the problem at hand - but it's actually quite damaging. In fact, the opposite is truer. More minds equal more opportunities for distractions. More minds muddle the focus of the meeting, and ultimately, this draws the employees that are irrelevant to the meeting away from their work.

Meetings multiply time spent

When you schedule a one-hour conference, it doesn’t seem like a big deal. It’s only an hour, so even if it isn’t completely productive, you’ve only lost one hour of time.

Unfortunately, this mentality doesn’t illustrate the whole picture. Meetings take time from everybody attending. Say you have seven participants in an hour-long meeting. By confab's conclusion, the company has lost seven hours of time. Assuming it's a weekly meeting, you can multiply that by 52. You're wasting more than 360 hours of company time every year simply by calling that meeting.