M4 059: How To Reduce Unnecessary Meetings

One Meeting Minute Thought for Your Week

Imagine if you knew how to reduce unnecessary meetings in your business.

How big of an impact would that have on your team’s productivity?

Based on my experience it would be HUGE!

You don’t have to take my word for it though. Research proves it.

I’ll show you the data in a moment, but first let’s dive into helping you learn how to reduce meetings that simply aren’t needed.

These are 5 techniques that work for me.

5 techniques to reduce unnecessary meetings

Cancel them!
Send an email.
Record a video.
Have a conversation.
Transform it into a necessary meeting.

We’ll start with the easiest and simplest solution.

The easiest way to reduce unnecessary meetings: Cancel Them!

This may seem obvious, but the easiest technique to reduce meetings is to cancel ones that aren’t needed.

Too many people never take the time to review the meetings they’ve scheduled and intentionally decide whether to have their meeting or cancel it.

This behavior leads to everyone’s calendar being filled with useless meetings.

And it destroys morale in companies – as research proves. More on that later.

So, take these three simple steps to do your part to reduce unnecessary meetings in the workplace.

Review the Purposes and Agendas of the meetings you own.
Take a few minutes to decide if the meeting will help your team accomplish the Purpose.
If your answer is No, cancel the meeting.

This is the best and simplest solution to remember when you’re wondering how to reduce unnecessary meetings in your business.

Use emails to avoid unnecessary meetings

This is one of the biggest pet peeves of my clients: “meetings that should have been emails.”

I know you’ve had the experience of leaving a meeting without interacting at all.

You just sat there and listened and everyone else did the same.

There was no discussion and no conversation.

The transfer of information was from one person to many people and in only one direction.

That type of communication is necessary in the workplace, but it’s best done through an email not a meeting.

So, when you start to schedule a meeting with the Purpose of conveying information to a group, consider if an email would be more efficient and effective.

Here are a few situations where you can reduce unnecessary meetings by sending an email instead:

Send your direct reports a quick update.
Make an announcement to a large group.
Request input or feedback on an idea or a project.
Give instructions you can clearly communicate in written form.

An added benefit of using an email instead of a meeting to request input on an idea is to give those who like to process their thoughts before they speak (like those “wishy washy people” who likely have the Working Geniuses of Wonder and Discernment) more time to think.

This will make your meeting more inclusive and effective.

Record a video to reduce your unnecessary meetings

My teammates and I use this technique a LOT.

We’re working on a global project with many team members in Asia.

And because the time difference between work locations is 12 to 14 hours, some of us are either getting up early or working late.

This isn’t a big deal when meetings are needed because we like our jobs and we’re committed to do our best for the project and the business.

But we do have families and personal lives so we do our best to avoid unnecessary meetings.

For many of our team members, time in a meeting is time away from our loved ones.

So this is what I like to do.

I schedule a Teams meeting with only myself – no one else is invited.

Then I start recording.

(IMPORTANT NOTE: Remember to hit “Record!” I’ve had to start over more times than I’d like to admit. Sadly, I made that mistake in the early days of my podcast and should know better by now!)

I share my screen and present content (presentations, spreadsheets, etc.) walking through the information just like I would if my coworkers on the other side of the globe were on the call.

Then I send the link to the video of the recorded “meeting” to my teammates who are sleeping as I’m recording so they can watch it when they arrive at work.

The transcript also helps us communicate more effectively since we have different first languages.

It’s easier to translate a foreign language when the words are written and available to read at the pace that works best for you.

Try this technique for all your meetings

This technique works great to avoid an unnecessary meeting and it works well for meetings in general.

Recording video of any meeting in Teams or another software like Loom has many advantages.

Video recordings are:

Available to be watched over and over to improve understanding and retention.
Effective for showing someone how to do something.
Quick to create compared to writing an email.
Powerful for communicating feedback.
Simple to share with others.

You can even use your phone to record a meeting and create a transcript.

I love to use my favorite podcasting recording software, SquadCast, to record meetings like my coaching calls.

SquadCast is now a part of Descript which happens to be my favorite audio and video editing software too and the integration is seamless!

Regardless of the tool you use to generate them, meeting transcripts can be fed into various AI tools to create meeting notes and summaries.

The technology we have available now is INCREDIBLE so why not make the most of it to reduce your unnecessary meetings?

Have a conversation to reduce unnecessary meetings

Ask any “old timer” (a category to which I now belong) how to cut down on meetings and they’ll probably give you one or both of these suggestions:

Pick up the phone and call me.
Stop by my desk.

I’ll be honest with you.

It’s easy for me to fall into the trap of sitting at my desk and scheduling a meeting with a bunch of people when I could just talk to them directly.

Do I really need to get everyone on a call or in a room at the same time to get the results I’m trying to achieve?

Sometimes I do but often I don’t.

In many situations, I could simply pick up the phone (which means put on my headset these days) and call my teammate.

Or I could just walk to their desk and talk to them in person. (Guys my age need to get my steps in anyway, right?)

This is a technique that worked in businesses long before even an old timer like me started my career!

Make an unnecessary meeting necessary

While you might choose to cancel an unnecessary meeting or avoid scheduling it using the previous four strategies, you have another option.

You can transform any unnecessary meeting to make it productive and effective. In other words, you can make it a meeting that’s necessary for your business to be successful.

Doing that is as simple as following the 3 Ps to make your meetings better.

Purpose – Why is this meeting being held?
People – Who needs to be in this meeting to accomplish the Purpose?
Preparation – What work needs to be done prior to the meeting to enable the People to accomplish the Purpose?

I know I come back to this same message often, but it’s true.

Follow the fundamentals for leading productive, effective meetings and your teammates will never call your meetings unnecessary.

More Resources to Help You Build Your Career and Your Business

If you’re not sure where to start to replace an unnecessary meeting with an email, check out this article:

🔷 Top 5 Tips To Write A Professional Email

And get the free “How to Write a Professional Email” guide I created for you.

The 6 Types of Working Genius has many benefits to help you know how to reduce meetings and make the ones you do have more productivity. I explain more in this article:

🔷 How To Recognize The Benefits Of The 6 Types Of Working Genius Model

This article will help you strengthen your fundamental meeting skills and reduce the number of unnecessary meetings in your business when you share it with your coworkers.

🔷 How To Use Structure To Effectively Lead Meetings

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

Otter.ai is software designed to make meetings better by creating automatic notes and they did the research on useless meetings I referenced earlier.

As they explain in this article Otter.ai found:

Companies pay an average of $80K per professional employee to attend meetings each year and $25K (31%) is to attend meetings deemed “unnecessary.”
Despite the profound amount of wasted time in meetings, companies and managers (78%) have never addressed declining meetings with employees, leaving employees feeling “annoyed” and “frustrated”.
Optimizing meeting attendance, while sharing meeting notes with employees who need the information, would not only reduce strain on employees and increase productivity organizationally, it would also help companies drastically cut costs they invest in unnecessary meetings by millions - companies with 100+ employees, cutting unnecessary meetings could save over $2M each year and for companies with more than 5,000 employees that number climbs to over $100M.

You can download the complete report here.

That’s All for this Issue

I suspect you not only agree with the data Otter.ai gathered in their study but have experienced the negative impact of unnecessary meetings yourself.

You know from personal experience how painful useless meetings can be!

So do what I do and keep trying new ways to reduce meetings that aren’t needed in your business.

These are five of my favorite techniques and I’d love to learn what works for you.