Who would ever have thought they would miss the days of begrudgingly joining a Zoom meeting from the privacy of their home office, checked pyjamas and slippers out of the camera’s sight, smart shirt in full view. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many workplaces were thrust into a virtual world, with Zoom meetings becoming the new norm, as companies adapted to remote work.

Now, however, as more businesses are increasingly transitioning back to in-person work, the face-to-face meeting is re-emerging – and reigniting the debate about its efficacy.

Since COVID-19 sent employees the world over to work from home, meeting loads have steadily risen. ‘Since before the pandemic, time spent in meetings has tripled, according to Microsoft, as work has shifted to be increasingly hybrid and remote,’ says Aydin Mirzaee, CEO of tech company Fellow.

It makes sense. According to Forbes Advisor, nearly one-fifth of the US workforce currently works remotely, and by next year, that figure will rise to 22%; that’s around 32.6 million people. So it’s little wonder that Zoom, Google Meet, Skype and are still being used by companies to ‘meet up’ with employees. However, in today’s post-COVID world, a vast number of companies are adopting hybrid working, if not a complete return to the office – five days a week.

In September, Dell called it quits on its hybrid work policy when it announced to its global sales team that employees who are able to work from the company offices must do so five days a week. As reported by Reuters, the motivation behind the change is to leverage a collaborative environment and ‘grow skills’, which requires the team to be in the office.

September also saw a memo to Amazon employees calling them back to the office. ‘We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,’ says Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon. ‘It’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practise and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and teams tend to be better connected to one another.’

He adds that ‘as we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artefacts that we’d like to change, for instance pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, and so on’.

Amazon employees have until 2 January – when the five days a week policy kicks in – to prepare themselves for a full return to the office. But considering the 2023 mandate by Amazon that employees return to the office for at least three days a week resulted in a lunchtime protest outside the company’s Seattle headquarters, it will be interesting to see how they feel about the definitive move to five days a week. And you’d best believe that they will attending more meetings.

Even the off-chance of a free muffin doesn’t lessen the fact that the majority of office meetings are disruptive, time-consuming and, at times, ego-driven exercises that yield few tangible results.

Meetings often devolve into platforms for individuals to assert their dominance or showcase their ideas rather than collaborative brainstorming sessions, a shift that can stifle open dialogue and diminish the contributions of quieter team members. And often meetings lack clear agendas, leading to aimless discussions that wander off topic. Without a defined purpose, participants may feel like their time is being wasted.

It’s also true that in many corporate cultures, meetings are seen as a default response to issues, rather than a tool for collaboration. This can lead to a vicious cycle where employees are bogged down by an avalanche of meetings, leaving little time for actual work.

And those unproductive meetings come at a greater cost, over and above draining workers of their energy, brainpower and stamina.

According to the Cape Chamber of Commerce, ‘managers and professionals lose 30% of their time in meetings that they could have invested in other productive tasks. Ineffective meetings make professionals lose 31 hours every month, which sums up to four working days’. The chamber goes on to add that the SA average monthly earnings in the non-agricultural sector is R23 982, and a company with, say, 100 employees earning this average salary, the annual cost of unproductive meetings could reach as much as R5.8 million.

In a survey of more than 30 000 organisations around the world, Fellow found that 78% of workers said they’re expected to attend too many meetings, and that just more than half of workers said they had to work overtime to make up for hours lost to meetings – and that rises to 67% for those at a director level or higher. Some 65% of senior managers noted that meetings keep them from completing their own work and 71% said meetings are unproductive and inefficient. Most also said meetings come at the expense of deep thinking.

That said, meetings aren’t inherently a bad thing. ‘At their best, they’re an ideal opportunity to align on goals, build relationships and make key decisions,’ says Mirzaee. ‘However, a meeting culture must be built to ensure time spent in meetings is effective and intentional.’

Andrew Meeding, COO of Kyta Industries agrees. ‘Regular meetings are important as they set a business/team report-back/debate point at a frequency that can be relied on and known in advance. It creates a rhythm of team contact and communication,’ he says. ‘However, it can be a waste of time if not structured and led well by a good leader who sticks to the agenda and ensures that those present stay on point and within the time allowed.’

Meeding recommends that a meeting agenda be set and communicated to the relevant parties beforehand. ‘The meeting leader must then stick to the agenda and not let members stray from it or take too long on points, ensuring that the meeting moves through the agenda points at a reasonable pace.’ Also important, he says, are the minutes of the meeting. ‘Action points, the person responsible and a due date should be communicated at the close of a meeting, and then sent via email after it.’

At its core, a productive meeting is one where conversations remain focused and the intended objectives – be it making crucial decisions or advancing a project – are successfully met. However, achieving this goes beyond merely following an agenda. Effective meetings also depend on best practices related to the number of participants, the duration of the meeting, and the distinction between external and internal gatherings, all of which contribute to a successful outcome.

George Bezos – former Amazon CEO – also had some interesting ideas as to how to manage meetings effectively. ‘We don’t do PowerPoint – or any other slide-oriented – presentations at Amazon,’ he wrote in a 2018 letter to shareholders. ‘Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.” Not surprisingly, the quality of these memos varies widely. Some have the clarity of angels singing. They are brilliant and thoughtful and set up the meeting for high-quality discussion. Sometimes they come in at the other end of the spectrum.’

Another of the Amazon founder’s bright ideas is the two-pizza teams concept. Ideally, as AWS explains in an online post, ‘this is a team of less than 10 people – smaller teams minimise lines of communication and decrease overhead of bureaucracy and decision-making’. In other words, no team should be big enough that it would take more than two pizzas to feed them.

The same thinking, applied to meetings, would also go a long way in cutting out the waffle. After all, in a world where time is a precious commodity, every minute counts.

By Nicola-Jane Ford
Image: Gallo/Getty Images