10 Tips for Reducing Wasteful Meetings

Meetings are expensive and often wasteful. Most people agree that “real work” should take priority over meetings. It is time to rethink how we approach meetings.

I recently saw this post below on twitter about the real-time tracking the cost of meetings.

It wasn’t real, but it got me thinking about the cost of meetings, how wasteful meetings can be, and how frequently new agile teams complain about meetings.

Many teams find that when they first move to agile, they are in many more meetings. We all know there are a lot of meetings in Scrum (some say too many).

Meetings are viewed as expensive and wasteful. Many people will argue that “real work” should take priority over meetings even though we all know that real work can get done in meetings if facilitated well. Still, is it time that we rethink how we approach meetings?

Seems To Be a Lot More Meetings Since the Pandemic

One of the outcomes of the pandemic was a large uptick in remote work. And with it came an onslaught of new meetings.

Managers needed to call a meeting to check in with people (and to make sure they were working).

People found it more difficult to have hallway meetings while working remotely. You don’t bump into people in the cafeteria or breakroom. You can’t simply pop in to ask a few questions.

As a result, more of the manager check-ins and quick discussions became formal meetings so much so that many people found themselves in meetings for their entire workday! Ouch! People were getting burned out.

Things have not yet returned to what was considered normal before the pandemic. They may never.

What Makes Meetings so Wasteful

Without a doubt, meetings can be expensive. But that doesn’t mean they are wasteful — they can still be a great investment.