The way we meet at work is broken. It’s leading to massive productivity and energy drains and high rates of overtime as we’re forced to play catch up out of hours. Here’s how we can fix the problem.

In the midst of complicated and overflowing workloads and technology designed to help us work faster and better, we’ve lost the art of gathering effectively. 

New research from Atlassian, which surveyed over 5000 people across the globe, has found that 72 per cent of meetings are deemed ineffective. Employees feel they’re hearing the same information on repeat, that they don’t have clarity on next steps and that a small portion of voices are dominating a large portion of the conversation.

“That’s not a recipe for an engaged, resilient or sustainable team,” says Dom Price, Futurist at Atlassian. “The biggest [productivity] killer in most organisations now is the recurring meeting – the one that exists because it once existed.”

This meeting overload is leading to 51 per cent of people working overtime at least a few times per week to get through their workloads. This number jumps to 67 per cent for senior employees.

“We’ve just started turning up to meetings and saying, ‘Let’s just make it up as we go along,’ but that’s a bit lazy. With the current economic environment… [and] the competition we’re up against, we haven’t got time to be wasting. So if you’re going to lock me in a meeting, make it effective,” says Price.

“It’s not a little tweak here and there. We need to fundamentally rethink how we use our time at work to be more effective.”

Take a team-based approach

The issue isn’t with meetings, but with the leaders running them, says Price. They haven’t been taught how to lead an effective meeting to align with the rising complexities of the work people are doing.

“I hoped this would happen post-pandemic, because so many things changed around how we worked… but I’ve felt the pendulum swing back.”

There’s no silver-bullet fix, says Price, but there are some effective starting points that he suggests. Firstly, don’t try to solve this at an individual level, because you’ll likely cause blockages or friction points for others.

“And don’t [try to] solve it at an organisational level by saying there’s only one way of meeting. People will comply, but then you’ve got no personalisation. Solve at a team layer. What works for us? What’s our rhythm and our cadence?”

“So much of what we think is a technology problem is actually a human problem.” – Dom Price, Futurist, Atlassian

At Atlassian, they call this process “Design your week”.

“The way I’ve structured mine, personally, is to have no meetings on a Monday because I have so many on Tuesday to Friday, because I work a lot with the US and Europe. But my Monday is their Sunday, so that’s my deep work time.

“Design your week on purpose. With a lot of organisations that I work with, their email inbox rules their week. The latest email that came in is what they focus on.”

This means we’re constantly working in a reactive manner, which more often than not takes us off the pathway of meaningful, value-adding work.

“If I’ve traded in my deep work – achieving my goals and working with my team to move a meaningful piece of work on – for a 90-minute meeting that didn’t achieve anything, that’s a really bad trade off.”

One team-based solution that has worked well for Atlassian is embracing asynchronous communication. Every Monday, Price and two of his Atlassian executive peers, who are located in America and Europe, share a video of themselves on their private Slack channel.

“We cover: What happened last week? Where are you at now? What’s happening next week? And what are the lessons learned? So that has eliminated a meeting, but we can still update each other. If we go without that, we lose that connection.” 

It’s far more effective than an email update, which can seem boring or introduce the risk of miscommunication. With video, you can get a better sense of how your colleagues are feeling.

“A few weeks ago [one of the leaders] sent his update and I pinged him afterwards to ask if he was okay because his energy was a little flat. And he told me he was feeling tired from a lot of travelling, so I said, ‘Just take some time off.’ I never would have got that signal from a written message.”

How to make your meetings more meaningful

Price thinks we spend far too much time talking about how bad meetings are, and not enough time doing something about it. So here are some of quick solves that you can easily implement this week:

• Empower people to decline low-priority meetings and group high-priority meetings together to free up consistent focus time in people’s diaries. You can use the matrix below to help employees make this decision.

• Create a short-form document that people can read ahead of the meeting so they know what’s expected of them and can prepare some thoughts. Read how Amazon practises this with their concept of ‘silent meetings’.

• Do an energy check at the start of the meeting so you know how you need to show up. Ask questions about how people are feeling or get people to talk about something interesting that happened in their week.
  
  “I ask those questions because if a room isn’t set up right, I might not be able to achieve what I need. I might need to do it another time. It’s not about taking up the whole time with chat, but just adding on a little layer of psychological safety before you get into business.”
  
  
• Make sure everyone knows what their role is: are they there to be the decision-maker, the idea generator, or perhaps the agitator? Everyone should know what’s expected of them.

• Change your default meeting invite times. Most calendars default to an hour, so aim for 30 minutes instead. Or make your 30-minute meetings quick 15-minute catch ups.
  

• Give people the opportunity to give feedback at the end of each meeting so you can improve for the next one.
  
  “It’s not about criticising, but saying, ‘How can we do it one degree better next time?’”

One of the most effective things you can do is get teams to determine how they want to work together by creating a working agreement, says Price.

“If I’ve traded my deep work – achieving my goals and working with my team to move a meaningful piece of work on – for a 90 minute meeting that didn’t achieve anything, that’s a really bad trade off.” – Dom Price, Futurist, Atlassian

“This came out of an experiment from Stanford. It’s in a book called The Friction Project by Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton – it’s a brilliant read.”

In the experiment, 80 teams were formed and all had the same goals to work towards. Forty of them were asked to just make a start and, initially, they made good progress. The second teams were first asked to figure out how they wanted to work together before they started.

“By around week three, the teams who had to spend the time figuring out how to work together were really slow. It looked like they were behind. But by week four, both teams were even and by week eight, the teams that had an agreed way of working were ploughing ahead and the team that didn’t were arguing. So much of what we think is a technology problem is actually a human problem.

“Despite all the technology advancements in 2024, one of the biggest differentiators for thriving teams that I’m working with right now is having a social contract of how they work together, but so many organisations just don’t do that. We rush straight into work.”

Listen to AHRI’s podcast episode with Michael Bungay Stanier which goes into detail about how to set up a working relationship for success.

To create your own working agreement, he suggests starting with a personal user manual (find a template here) to outline how to work best with you, how you like to receive feedback, what your values are, etc.

“The second thing to determine is our preferred communication style [as a team] and how we like to meet. So if you learn that, as a team, you like to communicate on Slack or Teams, then maybe you don’t need as many meetings.”

“Our other research shows the small amount of time spent upfront, doing this on purpose, fundamentally changes the outcomes you achieve. So it not only feels nicer – you’re more engaged, you’re happier – you actually achieve more.”

Access Atlassian’s free ‘working agreement’ play here, which has helped over 85,000 teams already.

Productivity can’t be the only goal

For knowledge workers, meetings aren’t necessarily productive, but they are effective, says Price. And that’s an important distinction that teams need to get comfortable with.

“[Meetings] give me context, they give me a chance to be creative, they give me a chance to explore new ideas. If I spend too much time by myself, that’s when the blinkers come on. But these [exchanges] don’t make me any faster, they make me stop and think.”

This is why we can’t position productivity as our only goal. 

“Some meetings are very agenda-driven: they’re structured so it almost runs like a metronome… I always know what it’s going to be like. But then there’s one that I run with the team once a month that’s completely loose, but we’ve agreed that we’re okay to spend 45 minutes doing that just to capture the things happening around the edges.

“For me, 2024 is the year we realise the uniqueness of human skills, and tap into them more rather than trying to compete with the machinery. And I think effective meetings are a great way of doing that.

“You’re playing with AI and machine learning; you’re playing with all these funky tools, but if you’ve not got that base layer of agreed upon behaviours… you’re wasting time and energy, you’re wasting your mojo on stuff that’s not giving you a dividend.”

Develop the necessary skills to build and sustain a high performing work team and tap into the full potential of team members with this short course from AHRI.