The New Statesman argues that meetings are a waste of time. It looks at research on the effects of ‘no meetings’ policies and finds:
Across all the companies in the study, the most beneficial results came when companies restricted meetings to two days per week. Holding good meetings is like swearing – “the more you do it, the more mundane it becomes”. At the companies with more meeting-free days, “meetings were better structured… they wanted to not beat around the bush but come to the point, have an agenda – what we call ‘meeting hygiene’”.
As facilitators, we’re used to hearing meetings dismissed as pointless but (beneath the rhetorical headline) it’s clear that how we meet, and how often, has a big effect on the value. And whether we meet online or in-person can have a big impact.
David Rock and Katherine Milan champion the value of online learning over in-person. They suggest that although we may like the idea of meeting in person to learn, there are huge advantages to learning online – not least because it makes it easier to break the learning into chunks spread over time. It also lends itself to powerful, peer-to-peer learning rather than a hierarchical, sage-on-the-stage approach:
But research shows the biggest factor in why people change is that they think other people are changing. Instead of a top-down model, we believe in an “everyone to everyone” model. Using a virtual approach in far less time than it would take to wrangle top executives, the majority of 10,000 employees could be doing something new every week. With the half-life of many skills shrinking fast, virtual learning enables an entire company to change in weeks instead of years.
Like everyone else, we’ve enjoyed some of the return to in-person meetings, but we’re also clear that there are some big advantages to online work.