Building a healthier meeting culture

Microsoft has been studying how people work and collaborate through research, surveys, and analysis of how customers use its tools. What the science says: There are ways to meet less often and still make everyone feel engaged and fully looped-in. We can learn from 2020—the year of meeting overload—and become wiser in 2021: Let’s make this the year of more thoughtful, more intentional meetings. Here are seven strategies to get you there.

Strategy One: Ask yourself, is a meeting the right way to get this done?

Does it feel like you’re in more meetings than ever? You are! An anonymized study of Microsoft Teams activity between February and August 2020 showed a 55% increase in the number of meetings and calls per week, spurred on by the shift to remote work during COVID-19. It was an understandable attempt to keep everyone connected—and it was unsustainable.

Within Microsoft 365, leaders have looked at the data and are pushing back against meetings as the default mode for collaboration. “We’re definitely asking, ‘Do you have to have this meeting—seriously, do you have to have it?’ ” says Jared Spataro, corporate vice president of Modern Work. “ ‘Are there other ways to move this project forward?’ And we’re being hard-core about it.”

When you do need to meet, don’t forget to assign roles—leader, presenter, note-taker—and to communicate the goal or goals of the meeting in the invitation. (And if it’s hard to articulate the goal, maybe you should rethink hosting a meeting.)

Strategy Two: Beware the “million-dollar meeting”

Does your organization hold meetings that are both recurring and very large? Companies should be mindful of that combination: It’s costly.

“One of the things we often show customers—and which is very powerful to the C-suite particularly—is their ‘million-dollar meeting,’ ” says Kamal Janardhan