Today while driving, I was listening to a podcast between David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried (Basecamp founders). They were talking about how toxic meetings are for various reasons:

• 1 hour meeting with 5 people is not a 1 hour meeting, its a 5 hour meeting. Because you are taking 1 hour of each person's time. So, you need to be very careful when you call a meeting.
• They involve coordination, causing scheduling issues and disrupting everyone's workflow and mindset
• They are usually not productive, because people are rarely prepared for them.
• They drift off topic and go on tangents that are not relevant to the meeting.

After I finished listing to the podcast, I wanted to check if there are facts that support this. I found this reserch on Harvard Business Review According to their survey of 182 senior managers across industries:

• 65% said meetings hindered their personal work completion.
• 71% found meetings unproductive and inefficient.
• 64% felt meetings compromised deep thinking.
• 62% believed meetings missed opportunities to bring the team closer.

So, here is what some companies (Example: Basecamp and 37signals) do to avoid traditional meetings:

• They go to first-writing approach instead of a first-meeeting approach. If there's something to discuss, write it down first, share it with the team, and then have a meeting only if and only if it's absolutely necessary.
• They use automatic weekly check-ins, like "What did you do this week?" through platforms like Slack. This keeps everyone informed and enables the creation of weekly reports for the team and stakeholders.
• There are also occasional automated "social questions" to encourage team members to share non-work-related activities, fostering better relationships.

As a result, the stakeholders are happy because they are getting weekly reports and the team is happy because they are not wasting their time in meetings. 😄

Resources:

• Stop the Meeting Madness
• Meetings are Toxic (Season 2)
• How We Communicate