Meeting creep: Stiff measures are being tested out against it

Shopify wants to cut down on ‘meeting creep’—the way meetings seem to proliferate on corporate calendars like mushrooms across a shady lawn. Earlier, the company axed recurring meetings of three or more people and went in for no-meet Wednesdays. Now, the Ottawa-based e-tailer has integrated a meeting-cost calculator into its calendar app.

If one tries to schedule a gathering of three or more people, a little red price tag pops up, estimating the cost based on the meeting’s size, its duration and average pay of participants. A 30-minute one of three people can run $700-1,600, depending on role and seniority, with executives joining sending it higher.

Parts of Shopify’s meeting cull could backfire. Should meeting schedulers be reminded how highly paid some managers are? Moreover, notes Benjamin Laker, a professor at Henley Business School in the UK, it’s “important to remember that the value of a meeting is not only defined by its length or number of attendees, but also by the productivity and quality of interactions.” But on balance, it’s a worthy test.

According to Laker, meetings are best used to assign work to teams, clarify policies or goals, and discuss which projects are going well or need action. These uses are well worth the cost. But too many meetings simply focus on information that could have been posted, providing status updates (what Slack is for); or setting deadlines.

Useless meetings are Enemy No. 1 today. In a Microsoft report, workers said “inefficient meetings” were the main barrier to getting stuff done. A 2021 survey suggested that employees attended an average of 11-15 meetings a week, executives even more. Another found that professionals spend half their time in meetings, a big jump.

Perhaps part of the shift is a move from spontaneous chats to planned ones. Stand-ins for office chatter. But flatter structures and more consensus-driven leadership also demand more collaboration. If you can’t make a decision without all the stakeholders in the room, you need a meeting. Hierarchies have downsides, but at least there’s less need to pull everyone together. Want a decision? Ask the one paid most.

Office design also plays a role. At one time, when private cabins were common, it was easier to pull someone in for a quick word. Now that privacy has reduced, every delicate conversation needs a meeting.

Then there’s the problem of doing too much. When leaders have tall expectations of what can be done, employees get overloaded and the surest way to get responses is to get on their calendar. Given all these ‘inflationary pressures’ on meetings, it makes sense to clamp down on them.

Reminding employees that ‘time is money’ is likely to have some drawbacks. Management professors Cassie Mogilner, Ashley Whillans and Michael Norton note in a research review that “when people are led to equate time and money by putting a price on their time… their behaviour changes.” They become less helpful, less willing to work on what’s not directly tied to their compensation, feel more stress and may become more impatient. Focusing on money makes people a little more anti-social, in other words—but it can also make them work longer and harder.

Another problem Shopify’s meeting-cost calculator won’t solve is inefficient meeting scheduling. The problem people have with meetings isn’t always their number, as they’re important, but having them scattered across the day in a way that makes focusing on deep work impossible. Clump them together, and people have at least a few hours a day to concentrate.

Even so, there are benefits to reducing the overall number of meetings. In a survey of 76 companies, Laker and his colleagues found that cutting the number of meetings improved employee productivity, accountability and job satisfaction and reduced workers’ sense of being micromanaged. He says that it is often more practical to designate certain mornings or afternoons as meeting-free, rather than entire days. “Having more time free from meetings is more important than having an entire day without them.”

Without meetings, workers took charge of their own to-do lists. Cooperation increased as workers connected one-on-one, either in person or via Slack, email or videoconference. There were also fewer misunderstandings, since people could refer back to Slack messages to see what was decided, rather than misremembering a (perhaps vague) conclusion to an in-person meeting.

Not to say that all meetings are bad. Too few meetings can be as bad as too many, the researchers say—the sweet spot is probably limiting meetings to 1-2 days every week. If a meeting-cost calculator is what’s needed to get down to that level, it’s a calculation that will pay off.

Sarah Carmichael is a Bloomberg Opinion editor.