This could have been an email
Maybe it should have been!
Meetings. They’re the worst.
I’m writing this on an odd day because — wait, let me get the tenses right — yesterday (which for me at this moment as I’m writing this is “today”), I had (“am about to have”) four online meetings.
Most days I have one at the most. Often none. In past careers it seemed they ran one after the other. So, while there are some disadvantages to what I do for a living, I count the fact that I don't usually have to sit through meeting after meeting most days as an advantage.
Why we’re talking about this: A massive new study of 450,000 workers published in Harvard Business Review says the meeting problem might be worse than we realized.
It turns out that online platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Cisco Webex compile hundreds of data points on every meeting and participant -- everything from whether people turn on their cameras to whether meetings start or finish on time.
So, Mike Tolliver and Jonathan Sass, who work together at analytics firm Vyopta, combed through anonymized data from 40 million meetings at 11 organizations. Their findings included:
Even as many companies announced return-to-office mandates, the sheer number of virtual meetings didn't go down appreciably. Employees had an average of 8.3 virtual meetings per week in 2021, rising to 10.3 in 2022, and falling slightly to 10.1 meetings per week in 2023.
The percentage of employees who stayed on mute for entire meetings (the no-participation rate) jumped by half between 2022 and 2023 (4.8 percent of all attendees in 2022; 7.2 percent in 2023). These numbers are probably lower than reality, Tolliver and Sass say, since if someone goes off mute to say hello at the start of a meeting, they're counted as having participated.
Employees who habitually kept front-facing cameras off during meetings had a higher attrition rate than those who turned them on. This is correlation, not causation, but employees who left their organization within one year after the study period had an 18.4 percent camera-on rate during meetings; those who stayed with the company had an average 32.5 percent camera-on rate.
Honestly, that first statistic jumped out at me: more than 10 virtual meetings per week on average?
The number includes short one-on-one meetings, and I suppose my personal statistics are skewed by the fact that I'm between virtual assistants at the moment, so I'm not doing a daily video check-in.
But still, even the CEO of Zoom has acknowledged having Zoom fatigue, once telling an interviewer:
"I do! I can tell you. Last April, [on one day] I had a total of 19 Zoom meetings! I'm so tired of that! I do not have any back-to-back meetings anymore. I think I feel much more comfortable."
Tolliver and Sass have some advice on how to use this data to improve meetings in any organization, including:
Creating a shared meeting culture that includes agreement on when not to hold meetings.
Maybe put a hard cap on the number of meetings that people are allowed to schedule, or the number of mandatory participants, so they learn to prioritize.
Maybe no meetings before or after a certain hour?
Or else, days on which virtual meetings aren't allowed?
Focus on the people who host the most meetings.
More than half of meetings are led by just 10 percent of employees, this research found. How many of them have had a chance to learn best practices and even simple tricks to make meetings better?
Track data -- the same things like average number of meetings, no-participation rate, and no-camera rate, for example.
"If a specific department has a particularly high no-participation rate," they write, "you could monitor how that number changes as you roll out trainings within the department."
Respect privacy. I can imagine that the idea of tracking things like how often employees' cameras are on could increase anxiety and actually make meetings worse. So, the focus here is on anonymized data at scale, rather than looking at specific employees' experiences.
Provide executive visibility, which is a fancy way of saying whoever the boss is should lead by example. Nobody will make better meetings a priority unless the boss makes it clear that it's a priority.
A lot of readers find this newsletter because they originally found something I wrote on Inc.com. And that means we have a lot of business leaders in the group.
So maybe I can address the final point of this to them:
But, a big part of leadership is making sure the people who work for you have the things they need to succeed. Sometimes it also means making sure they have less of what they don’t have.
Besides: Email is a pretty cool invention, right? Maybe we can use it a little bit more often.
7 other things …
U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday following the attempted assassination of former President Trump earlier this month at a rally in Pennsylvania, according to multiple media outlets. The shooting by a lone gunman killed one person and wounded the Republican presidential nominee and two others. By Cheatle's own admission, it marked the "most significant operational failure of the Secret Service in decades." (Axios)
Bad news for passengers: Delta Air Lines canceled hundreds more flights early Tuesday morning, as the problems caused by last week’s global tech outage continued into a fifth day. Worse news: Delta’s meltdown will probably extend through the end of the week. (CNN)
A stunning 10% of Cuba’s population — more than a million people — left the island between 2022 and 2023, the head of the country’s national statistics office said during a National Assembly session Friday, the largest migration wave in Cuban history. (Miami Herald)
President Joe Biden will address the nation Wednesday night in a prime-time address, in which he will discuss his decision to drop out of the presidential race, which he announced Sunday. (Mediaite)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said his estranged transgender daughter was "killed" by the "woke mind virus" after he was "tricked" into agreeing to gender-affirming care procedures. Musk went on to say that the experience set him on a mission. Musk announced his plan to buy Twitter 3 days after his child filed a court action for a name change and to sever all legal ties with him. "I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that," Musk said. "And we’re making some progress." (USA Today)
Using shovels or their bare hands, local residents on Tuesday searched desperately for survivors after a landslide in a remote area of southern Ethiopia killed at least 229 people, the deadliest such disaster recorded in the Horn of Africa nation. Crowds gathered at the site of the tragedy in an isolated and mountainous area of South Ethiopia’s regional state, according to images posted on social media by the local authority. (Barrons)
I guess people do this, but this is a weird article by a certified financial planner suggesting an unusual way to make extra money: Donating plasma is a great side hustle — my husband and I made $1,500 in our first month. (Business Insider)
Thanks for reading. Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
Bill, there are also a bunch of people who multi-task while on calls. People do emails, eat, pet their dog, etc. That won’t show up in the data.
When I was in the corporate world, I easily had 8 to 12 video meetings per day. I definitely cherish not spending my days like this anymore. But email was another big problem. Instead of picking up the phone, or popping up in their colleague’s office, people would send long emails, and copy colleagues who didn’t really need to be Cced. Flooded with emails, many wouldn’t read or respond to their emails, prompting more emails from the original sender. A complete overhaul of communication practices in the corporate world is much needed. This would most likely result in a significant increase in efficiency.