MIT Study of 76 Companies Reveals No Meeting Days Boost Team Productivity by 73%

A 5 step plan you can use to implement a no-meeting day in your organization

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

You’re not imagining it, we're all having too many meetings.

The average knowledge worker spends 23 hours a week in meetings. Since shifting to remote and hybrid working, meetings have steadily increased in duration and frequency, with people attending 13 percent more meetings than they were before. A growing body of research is reporting that spending the majority of your workday in meetings negatively affects psychological, physical, and mental well-being.

Even before the pandemic, managers thought meetings were often a poor use of people’s time. In 2017, Harvard Business School surveyed 182 senior managers across multiple industries and found:

· 71% said meetings were unproductive and inefficient

· 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work

· 64% said team meetings come at the expense of deep thinking

· 62% said meetings miss opportunities to bring their teams closer together

Many organizations are adopting no-meeting days