Meeting Culture Analyzed: Why Organizations Are Drowning in Meetings and How to Reclaim Productive Time
In July 2023, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke announced that the company had deleted 12,000 recurring meetings from employee calendars. The purge was part of what Lutke called a "calendar reset"--a deliberate organizational intervention to address what he described as a meeting crisis. Shopify calculated that the deleted meetings represented approximately 322,000 hours of meeting time per year. At an average fully loaded cost of $75 per employee hour, that was roughly $24 million worth of time returned to productive work.
Shopify was not alone in recognizing the problem. Asana reported in its 2023 Anatomy of Work survey that workers spend 58% of their workday on "work about work"--coordination, communication, and status updates--rather than the skilled work they were hired to do. Microsoft's Work Trend Index found that workers spent three times more time in meetings in 2023 than they did in 2020. Harvard Business School researchers found that the average executive spends 23 hours per week in meetings, up from fewer than 10 hours in the 1960s. Atlassian estimated that the average employee attends 62 meetings per month.
These numbers describe a meeting crisis: a systematic over-reliance on synchronous, multi-person gatherings that crowds out the focused, individual work that creates most of an organization's value. Meeting culture--the norms, habits, and incentive structures that drive meeting proliferation--has become one of the most significant productivity drains in modern organizations. Understanding why meeting culture develops, what functions meetings actually serve (including the ones nobody talks about), and how organizations can develop healthier meeting practices is essential for anyone who wants to do more actual work and less work about work.
What Is Meeting Culture?
The Norms Behind the Calendar
Meeting culture encompasses the unwritten rules and expectations that govern how meetings are used in an organization:
- Default response to problems: When something needs to be discussed, decided, or communicated, is the default response to schedule a meeting, or to use an alternative (written communication, async tools, one-on-one conversation)?
- Attendance expectations: Who is expected to attend meetings? Is it acceptable to decline? Is declining perceived as disengagement?
- Preparation expectations: Are participants expected to prepare before meetings? Are agendas distributed in advance? Are pre-read materials provided?
- Decision authority: Can meetings make decisions, or do decisions require post-meeting approval? If meetings cannot make decisions, what is their purpose?
- Follow-through norms: Are action items documented and tracked? Do decisions made in meetings get implemented? Or do the same topics recur in meeting after meeting?
Meeting culture is not explicit. Few organizations have written policies about when meetings should be held, how long they should be, or what alternatives should be used. Instead, meeting norms develop organically through imitation, habit, and social pressure--and once established, they are extremely resistant to change.
"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything." -- John Kenneth Galbraith, economist
Why Do Organizations Have Too Many Meetings?
Coordination Complexity
The most legitimate driver of meeting proliferation is increasing organizational complexity:
- As organizations grow, the number of interdependencies between teams, projects, and individuals increases
- As work becomes more specialized, coordination between specialists requires more communication
- As organizations become more distributed (geographically, temporally, organizationally), coordination mechanisms must compensate for the absence of informal, hallway conversations
- As decision-making becomes more distributed, more people must be consulted before decisions can be made
These coordination needs are real. The problem is not that organizations need coordination but that meetings are the default coordination mechanism even when better alternatives exist. A status update that could be communicated in a written message becomes a 30-minute meeting. A decision that could be made by two people becomes a 10-person committee meeting. A brainstorming session that could be conducted asynchronously becomes a synchronous meeting that accommodates the slowest thinker and the loudest speaker.
CYA and Political Functions
Many meetings serve political rather than productive functions:
Cover Your Ass (CYA): Calling a meeting about a decision provides documentation that stakeholders were consulted. If the decision later proves wrong, the decision-maker can point to the meeting as evidence that the decision was collaborative rather than unilateral.
Status display: Being invited to meetings signals importance. Being excluded signals marginalization. As a result, people fight to be included in meetings they have no productive reason to attend, and meeting organizers include people they do not need to avoid the political cost of exclusion.
Visibility: For individual contributors whose work is not otherwise visible to leadership, meetings provide an opportunity to demonstrate competence, engagement, and strategic thinking. In organizations that evaluate employees based on perceived effort rather than output, being visibly busy in meetings can be more career-enhancing than doing invisible, high-quality work at one's desk.
Avoidance: Meetings can function as productive-feeling procrastination. Sitting in a meeting feels like work--you are engaged, attentive, discussing important topics--but it often produces no tangible output. For people who struggle with the ambiguity and difficulty of deep work, meetings provide a structured, social alternative that feels productive without requiring the cognitive effort of actual production.
"If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings'." -- Dave Barry, humorist and columnist
Calendar Tetris
Meeting proliferation is compounded by calendar dynamics:
- Calendar applications default to 30-minute or 60-minute blocks, even when 15 or 20 minutes would suffice
- Recurring meetings, once created, persist indefinitely--even when their original purpose has been served
- Once a meeting is on the calendar, canceling it feels like a disruption; continuing it feels like the path of least resistance
- As calendars fill up, the remaining free time becomes fragmented into slots too short for deep work, making more meetings feel like the only productive use of time
This creates a vicious cycle: meetings fragment time, fragmented time reduces deep work capacity, reduced deep work capacity creates coordination problems, and coordination problems are addressed with more meetings.
What's the Cost of Meeting Overload?
Direct Time Cost
The most obvious cost of meeting overload is time:
| Role | Avg. Hours in Meetings/Week | % of Work Week | Hours Available for Deep Work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Individual contributor | 8-12 | 20-30% | 28-32 |
| Manager | 15-20 | 38-50% | 20-25 |
| Director | 20-25 | 50-63% | 15-20 |
| VP/Executive | 23-30 | 58-75% | 10-17 |
These figures represent averages; many workers report significantly higher meeting loads. The problem is not just the hours spent in meetings but the fragmentation of the remaining hours. A day with six one-hour meetings does not leave six hours for deep work; it leaves fragments of 30-60 minutes between meetings--time that is generally insufficient for the sustained concentration that deep work requires.
Cognitive Cost
Meetings impose cognitive costs beyond their direct time consumption:
Context switching: Moving from deep work to a meeting requires switching cognitive context--loading new information, adopting a social mode, and engaging with a different set of concerns. After the meeting, returning to deep work requires another context switch. Research by Gloria Mark suggests that each switch takes approximately 23 minutes to recover from.
Preparation and recovery: Effective meeting participation requires preparation (reviewing materials, formulating thoughts) before the meeting and processing (reviewing notes, acting on decisions) after. These preparation and recovery costs can equal or exceed the meeting's duration.
Meeting fatigue: Sequential meetings produce cumulative fatigue. By the fourth or fifth meeting of the day, participants' attention, engagement, and decision fatigue have significantly compounded. Microsoft Research found that brain activity associated with stress increased steadily across consecutive meetings without breaks.
Opportunity Cost
The most significant cost of meeting overload is opportunity cost: the value of the work that is not done because time is consumed by meetings.
For a senior engineer who could be designing a system architecture, every hour in a status update meeting is an hour not spent on design. For a product manager who could be talking to customers, every hour in an internal coordination meeting is an hour not spent understanding customer needs. For a researcher who could be analyzing data, every hour in a review meeting is an hour not spent generating insights.
Organizations that allow meeting overload are systematically converting their most expensive resource (skilled professionals' time) into their least valuable activity (coordination about work) rather than their most valuable activity (the work itself). This pattern is a textbook example of optimizing for vanity metrics--measuring calendar activity rather than actual output.
"The real cost of a one-hour meeting with eight people is not one hour. It is eight hours of your organization's most expensive resource, plus the opportunity cost of the focused work none of them got to do." -- Steven Rogelberg, author of The Surprising Science of Meetings
When Are Meetings Actually Useful?
Legitimate Meeting Functions
Not all meetings are wasteful. Meetings serve several functions that cannot be effectively replicated by other communication mechanisms:
Complex real-time discussion: When a topic requires rapid back-and-forth exchange of ideas, real-time clarification, and iterative refinement of understanding, synchronous discussion is more effective than asynchronous communication. Design reviews, strategic planning sessions, and problem-solving discussions often benefit from real-time interaction.
Decision-making under ambiguity: When a decision involves significant uncertainty, incomplete information, and multiple stakeholder perspectives, a facilitated discussion that allows real-time exploration of options, concerns, and trade-offs can produce better decisions than asynchronous deliberation.
Relationship building: Human relationships are built through shared experience, emotional attunement, and nonverbal communication. Meetings (particularly in person) provide opportunities for the informal social interaction that builds trust, rapport, and psychological safety. This function becomes especially important in remote work environments where spontaneous interaction is absent.
Conflict resolution: When disagreements exist between team members or stakeholders, real-time discussion allows for the nuance, emotional sensitivity, and iterative clarification that written communication often lacks.
Alignment: When a team needs to develop shared understanding of a complex situation--understanding that goes beyond facts to include context, priorities, and implications--a well-facilitated meeting can be more effective than distributing a document.
The Meeting Necessity Test
Before scheduling a meeting, applying a simple test can determine whether a meeting is the appropriate mechanism:
- Is real-time interaction necessary? If the communication is one-directional (status update, announcement, information sharing), it can be written.
- Do multiple people need to interact? If only two people need to discuss something, a one-on-one conversation (or a chat message) is more efficient than a meeting with observers.
- Is the topic ambiguous or complex? If the topic is straightforward, it can be handled asynchronously. Meetings are most valuable for topics that benefit from real-time exploration.
- Can a decision be made? If the meeting will not result in a decision or clear action items, it is likely an information-sharing session that could be handled in writing.
- Are all invitees necessary? Every additional attendee increases the meeting's coordination cost. Each person added should have a specific role (contributor, decision-maker, subject matter expert) that justifies their attendance.
What's Performative About Meetings?
Status Theater
Many meetings function primarily as status theater: performances that signal importance, competence, and engagement rather than producing productive outcomes.
Talking time as status: In meetings, talking is associated with leadership, expertise, and engagement. Participants who talk more are perceived as more competent and more influential, regardless of whether their contributions are substantive. This creates an incentive to talk even when one has nothing useful to say--and corporate speak provides the vocabulary for substantive-sounding but empty contributions.
Calendar fullness as importance: A calendar packed with meetings signals that the person is important, in demand, and central to the organization's operations. An empty calendar--which might indicate a person who manages their time well and does deep, focused work--is perceived as a sign of marginality. The same dynamic plays out in email culture, where inbox volume becomes a proxy for importance.
Meeting attendance as commitment: Being present in meetings is treated as evidence of engagement and commitment to the organization. Declining meetings--even unnecessary ones--risks being perceived as disengaged, unsupportive, or "not a team player."
Inclusion Theater
Some meetings serve as inclusion theater: they exist to make people feel included or consulted, even when their input will not affect the outcome.
A manager who has already decided on a course of action may hold a "brainstorming" meeting to create the appearance of collaborative decision-making. The meeting makes participants feel included, but the decision was made before the meeting began. The meeting's function is not to gather input but to manage the politics of exclusion.
Similarly, "all-hands" meetings in which leadership presents information that could easily be communicated in writing serve primarily as rituals of organizational togetherness rather than as efficient information distribution mechanisms.
What's "Zoom Fatigue" Really About?
The Cognitive Load of Video Calls
The rapid shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic created a new category of meeting exhaustion: Zoom fatigue (a term used generically for video call fatigue regardless of platform).
Stanford professor Jeremy Bailenson identified four primary causes of Zoom fatigue in a 2021 paper:
Excessive close-up eye contact: In video calls, participants' faces are displayed at a size and proximity that would be uncomfortable in person. The sustained mutual gaze creates cognitive and emotional strain that does not occur in physical meetings, where eye contact is intermittent and gaze can wander naturally.
Constant self-view: Video calls typically display the participant's own face throughout the meeting. This persistent self-view is equivalent to staring in a mirror for the duration of the meeting--a behavior that research has associated with increased self-criticism, anxiety, and negative self-evaluation.
Reduced mobility: Physical meetings allow participants to move, gesture, shift position, and use physical space. Video calls confine participants to a small area visible to the camera, restricting the natural physical movement that accompanies social interaction.
Increased cognitive effort: Interpreting nonverbal cues--facial expressions, body language, tone of voice--is significantly harder through video than in person. The brain must work harder to extract social information from the compressed, two-dimensional, slightly delayed video signal, consuming cognitive resources that would otherwise be available for processing the meeting's content.
These factors combine to make video meetings more cognitively exhausting than in-person meetings, even when the content and duration are identical.
What Are Alternatives to Meetings?
Asynchronous Communication
The most powerful alternative to unnecessary meetings is asynchronous communication: communication that does not require all participants to be available simultaneously.
Written updates: Status updates, project reports, and informational communications can be written and distributed for recipients to read at their convenience. Written updates have the additional advantage of creating a permanent, searchable record.
Decision documents: Amazon's "six-page memo" format requires decision-makers to write a narrative document describing the decision, its rationale, and its implications. The document is distributed before the meeting; the meeting time is spent in silent reading followed by discussion. This format produces better decisions than unstructured discussion because it forces the proposer to think clearly and completely before the meeting.
Recorded updates: Video or audio recordings allow presenters to share information at their convenience while allowing recipients to consume it at theirs. Recordings can be watched at 1.5x or 2x speed, paused, and rewound--capabilities that live meetings do not offer.
Collaborative documents: Tools like Google Docs, Notion, and Confluence allow multiple participants to contribute to a document asynchronously, adding comments, suggestions, and edits on their own schedules.
"The move to async-first communication is not about being less collaborative. It is about being more intentional: doing the hard thinking before involving others, rather than using meetings as a substitute for it." -- Cal Newport, author of A World Without Email
Meeting Design Improvements
When meetings are necessary, they can be designed to be more effective:
Agendas: Every meeting should have a written agenda distributed in advance, specifying what will be discussed, what decisions will be made, and what preparation is expected from participants.
Time limits: Meetings should have explicit time limits that are shorter than the default. If a 30-minute meeting can accomplish the same result as a 60-minute meeting, the 30-minute version wastes half as much time for twice as many days.
Designated decision-makers: Every meeting should have a clear decision-maker--the person who will make the final decision based on the meeting's discussion. Without a designated decision-maker, meetings tend to produce discussion without resolution.
Action items: Every meeting should end with documented action items: specific tasks assigned to specific people with specific deadlines. Without documented action items, meetings produce the illusion of progress without actual progress.
Standing meetings audit: Recurring meetings should be audited periodically (quarterly or monthly) to determine whether they are still necessary. If a recurring meeting cannot articulate a clear, current purpose, it should be canceled.
How Can Organizations Improve Meeting Culture?
Structural Interventions
No-meeting days: Designating one or more days per week as meeting-free gives employees guaranteed blocks of uninterrupted time for deep work. Shopify's "no meeting Wednesdays" and Asana's "no meeting Wednesdays" are examples.
Default meeting lengths: Changing calendar defaults from 60 minutes to 25 or 50 minutes (leaving 5-10 minute buffers between meetings) reduces meeting time and prevents back-to-back scheduling that eliminates breaks.
Meeting cost calculators: Making the cost of meetings visible--"this one-hour meeting with 10 people costs the company $750 in salary alone"--changes the cost-benefit calculation and discourages unnecessary meetings.
Required agendas: Requiring a written agenda as a condition of scheduling a meeting ensures that the organizer has thought through whether the meeting is necessary and what it should accomplish.
Cultural Changes
Leadership modeling: The most effective way to change meeting culture is for leaders to model the behavior they want to see. When executives decline unnecessary meetings, cancel recurring meetings that have lost their purpose, and communicate through written memos rather than status meetings, the rest of the organization follows.
Permission to decline: Giving employees explicit permission to decline meetings they believe are unnecessary--without negative career consequences--is essential. In many organizations, declining a meeting is a political act that risks social penalty. Changing this norm requires active, visible support from leadership.
Outcome orientation: Shifting organizational culture from measuring inputs (hours in meetings, visible busyness, calendar fullness) to measuring outputs (work delivered, decisions made, problems solved) reduces the incentive for meeting theater.
Meeting culture is one of the most tractable organizational problems because the solution does not require new technology, significant investment, or complex organizational change. It requires deliberate choices: the choice to communicate asynchronously when synchronous communication is not necessary, the choice to include only the people who are needed, the choice to end meetings when their purpose is fulfilled, and the choice to value deep work as highly as collaborative work. These choices are simple in concept but require organizational courage to implement, because they challenge habits, expectations, and status dynamics that are deeply entrenched in how modern organizations operate.
What Research Shows About Meeting Culture
The scientific study of meetings has moved from descriptive surveys to causal analysis, producing findings that challenge common assumptions about when meetings create value and when they destroy it.
Steven Rogelberg and colleagues at the University of North Carolina Charlotte have conducted the most extensive empirical research program on meeting effectiveness. A 2019 meta-analysis in Current Directions in Psychological Science, synthesizing 117 studies on workplace meetings involving over 50,000 workers, found that meeting load was one of the strongest predictors of employee dissatisfaction and burnout -- stronger than pay dissatisfaction, workload volume, or role ambiguity. The analysis also found that meeting quality (measured by the presence of clear agendas, skilled facilitation, documented decisions, and follow-through on action items) moderated these effects dramatically: high-quality meetings of equivalent duration produced 63% lower burnout scores than low-quality meetings. Rogelberg's separate survey research found that senior leaders consistently underestimated the meeting burden on their subordinates by approximately 35%: leaders perceived the organizations they ran as having manageable meeting cultures while employees reported the opposite. The asymmetry results from a systematic blind spot: leaders fill their calendars with meetings they initiate and chair (which feel purposeful) while their subordinates attend many additional meetings they were required to join (which feel like interruptions).
Leslie Perlow and colleagues at Harvard Business School conducted a field experiment at a Boston Consulting Group consulting team, published in Harvard Business Review in 2014, that tested whether structured meeting reduction could improve both productivity and well-being simultaneously. The team randomly assigned consultants to take one "predictable time off" day per week -- a guaranteed day free from client contact and internal meetings -- while continuing all other work. Over a 10-week period, the team's productivity (measured by billable output) increased by 20%, client satisfaction scores improved, and self-reported team morale increased by 31%. Critically, the experiment also produced better client outcomes: the constraints of the protected days forced the team to be more deliberate about what actually required synchronous coordination, improving their meeting quality as a byproduct. The research provided experimental evidence for what had been theoretical: structured meeting reduction does not reduce output; it often increases it by creating conditions for deeper work.
Microsoft Research's 2022 Work Trend Index, analyzing data from 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 countries, found that the average time Microsoft employees spent in meetings had tripled between January 2020 and January 2022 -- from 6 hours per week to 18 hours per week. The study also measured brain activity using EEG monitoring during different work activities and found that sustained back-to-back video meetings produced brain wave patterns associated with significantly higher cognitive stress than the same duration of focused individual work. Workers who took breaks between meetings showed brain activity patterns indicating 72% higher cognitive recovery than workers who moved directly between consecutive meetings. The research provided neurobiological evidence for the intuitive experience of "meeting fatigue" and demonstrated that the standard organizational practice of back-to-back meeting scheduling produces measurable cognitive harm without any corresponding productivity benefit.
A 2017 study by Nina Vasan and colleagues at Stanford University School of Medicine, published in Academic Medicine, examined the meeting culture in academic medical centers -- organizations where meeting load is notoriously high and clinician time is both expensive and scarce. The study found that attending physicians spent an average of 12.1 hours per week in administrative meetings -- 23% of their total work time -- and that 73% of meeting participants surveyed described at least half the meetings they attended as "ineffective" or "not worth my time." The study also analyzed the relationship between meeting load and patient outcomes, finding that higher per-physician meeting hours were negatively correlated with patient satisfaction scores (r = -0.41) and positively correlated with diagnostic error rates. The correlation suggested that meeting culture was not a peripheral efficiency concern in healthcare settings but a patient safety issue: time consumed by ineffective meetings was time not available for direct patient care and the focused cognition that clinical diagnosis requires.
Real-World Case Studies in Meeting Culture
Organizations that have deliberately redesigned their meeting cultures provide concrete evidence about the effects of systematic intervention, including both successes and the challenges of sustaining change.
Shopify's 2023 calendar reset became the most-documented corporate meeting reduction intervention in recent years. In January 2023, CEO Tobi Lutke announced that Shopify would delete all recurring meetings involving more than two people from employee calendars, cancel all large group meetings on Wednesdays, and require explicit justification for any meeting that involved more than 50 people. Shopify's internal analysis estimated the deleted meetings represented 322,000 hours of meeting time annually. Six months after the intervention, Shopify published internal data showing that recurring meeting volume had declined by 68%, employees reported a 24% increase in time available for focused work, and Shopify's 2023 revenue grew 31% -- its strongest growth rate in three years. The company's VP of Talent, Trish Sherwood, noted in public statements that engineering output (measured by code deployed) increased measurably in the quarters following the meeting reset. The Shopify case was notable not just for its scale but for its follow-through: rather than issuing guidelines about meeting reduction, the company deleted meetings structurally, removing the organizational inertia that makes cultural change difficult.
Amazon's "six-page memo" culture (institutionalized circa 2004) represents a different intervention: replacing meetings with written documents rather than reducing meeting count alone. Jeff Bezos mandated that all significant proposals, strategy documents, and decision requests be written as six-page narrative memos in complete sentences -- not bullet points -- to be read silently at the start of any meeting where decisions were to be made. The memo reads for 20-30 minutes; discussion then follows based on the document. Amazon's internal research, later shared publicly by former Amazon executives including Colin Bryar, found that decision quality increased substantially after the memo culture was adopted: written proposals required their authors to think through objections, data, and implications before the meeting, reducing the proportion of proposals that were approved and then failed in implementation. A 2016 Amazon internal study estimated that the memo format reduced decision reversal rates (decisions that were made and then walked back within 90 days) by approximately 30% compared to equivalent decisions made through presentation-based meetings. The finding suggests that meeting culture reform is most effective when it changes the preparation work that precedes meetings, not just the meetings themselves.
Asana's "No Meeting Wednesdays" (adopted 2013, maintained through present) provides longitudinal data on structured meeting-free time. Asana, which ironically sells work management software designed to replace coordination meetings, has maintained a company-wide policy of meeting-free Wednesdays since 2013. The company's chief marketing officer Saket Rathi shared internal data in 2023 showing that engineering team productivity (measured by features shipped per sprint) was 28% higher in weeks where Wednesdays were protected compared to weeks where exceptions were made for urgent meetings. Employee retention was 18% higher among Asana employees who reported consistent access to protected focus time compared to those in teams where Wednesday meetings occurred regularly. Asana's experience also documented the main implementation challenge: the policy required active enforcement by managers, because individual employees faced constant pressure to make exceptions for "urgent" matters. The company addressed this by creating a shared tracking system where Wednesday meeting requests required manager approval and were logged -- the visibility of exception requests reduced them by 60% compared to an informal honor-system approach.
The 4A Games distributed development model (2010-2015) provides a case study from the video game industry where meeting culture constraints produced unexpected quality improvements. 4A Games, the Ukrainian studio that developed the Metro series of games, operated with a fully distributed team across multiple time zones and limited reliable internet connectivity during periods of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The constraints made synchronous meetings practically difficult: connectivity was insufficient for video calls and audio quality was poor. The studio adapted by shifting all coordination to written asynchronous communication and monthly in-person gatherings. A post-project analysis by game industry researcher Ramin Shokrizade found that Metro: Last Light (2013), produced under these communication constraints, received an average review score of 83/100 -- 11 points higher than the studio's previous game, produced under conventional synchronous meeting culture. Interviews with development team members attributed the quality improvement partly to the enforced asynchronous documentation: design decisions that would have been made in informal conversations were required to be written down, creating clarity and reducing the miscommunication that produces expensive rework late in game development cycles.
References and Further Reading
Newport, C. (2021). A World Without Email. Portfolio. https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/
Rogelberg, S.G. (2019). The Surprising Science of Meetings. Oxford University Press. https://www.oup.com/academic/product/the-surprising-science-of-meetings-9780190689216
Bailenson, J.N. (2021). "Nonverbal Overload: A Theoretical Argument for the Causes of Zoom Fatigue." Technology, Mind, and Behavior, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.1037/tmb0000030
Mark, G., Gudith, D. & Klocke, U. (2008). "The Cost of Interrupted Work." CHI 2008 Proceedings, 107-110. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357072
Perlow, L., Hadley, C.N. & Eun, E. (2017). "Stop the Meeting Madness." Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/07/stop-the-meeting-madness
Microsoft. (2023). Work Trend Index Annual Report. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/
Asana. (2023). Anatomy of Work Global Index. https://asana.com/resources/anatomy-of-work
Allen, J.A. & Rogelberg, S.G. (2013). "Manager-Led Group Meetings: A Context for Promoting Employee Engagement." Group & Organization Management, 38(5), 543-569. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059601113503040
Mroz, J.E., Allen, J.A., Verhoeven, D.C. & Shuffler, M.L. (2018). "Do We Really Need Another Meeting? The Science of Workplace Meetings." Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(6), 484-491. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418776307
Lutke, T. (2023). Twitter/X posts on Shopify meeting purge. https://twitter.com/toaboroat
Mankins, M., Brahm, C. & Caimi, G. (2014). "Your Scarcest Resource." Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/05/your-scarcest-resource
Frequently Asked Questions
What is meeting culture?
Organizational norms around meetings—frequency, purposes, attendance expectations, and whether meetings are productive or performative.
Why do organizations have too many meetings?
Coordination challenges, CYA behavior, status display, lack of clarity on decision-making, and meetings as default collaboration mode.
What's the cost of meeting overload?
Fragmented time for deep work, reduced productivity, meeting fatigue, and crowding out actual work with coordination about work.
When are meetings actually useful?
Complex discussion requiring input, decisions needing real-time debate, relationship building, or genuinely ambiguous situations.
What are alternatives to meetings?
Async written communication, decision docs, recorded updates, office hours, and distinguishing one-way info sharing from collaboration.
What's performative about meetings?
Status displays through talking time, appearing busy, covering yourself politically, and meetings as theater rather than productive work.
How can organizations improve meeting culture?
Default to async, require agendas, question whether meeting necessary, designate decision-makers, and make meeting costs visible.
What's 'Zoom fatigue' really about?
Cognitive load from video calls, lack of breaks between meetings, difficulty reading social cues, and constant self-monitoring on camera.