9 Tips to Avoid Meetings That Could Have Been Emails

If you’re in leadership, you’ve probably hosted at least one meeting where you sensed that those present were doing more squirming than learning.

And we’ve all heard the expression “work smarter not harder,” right?

Well, it doesn’t take a time-consuming, unproductive meeting to understand that unnecessary meetings are a common and costly time-waster throughout the professional world.

Career website Zippia offers some eye-opening survey stats that help illustrate the problem:

• Some $37 billion is lost per year (24 billion hours wasted) due to unproductive meetings.
• Organizations spend roughly 15% of their time in meetings, with surveys showing that 71% of those meetings are considered unproductive.
• At least 37% of employees consider unproductive meetings to be the highest cost to their organization.

The importance of meeting efficiency

For anyone who needs further convincing that the problem is real — that prepping for and the sitting in meetings chews up huge chunks of valuable time and undercuts productivity — here are some additional statistics from Zippia:

• The average worker spends at least three hours a week in meetings, with 30% of workers reporting that they spend over five hours per week in meetings.
• 65% of employees agree that meetings prevent them from completing their own work.
• 45% of employees feel overwhelmed by the number of meetings they attend.
• The average CEO has at least 37 meetings per week, taking up 72% of their time.
• 55+% of remote workers think a majority of meetings “could have been an email.”

In addition to lost productivity, ineffective meetings are expensive — after all, as a business leader, you're responsible for paying the salary of everyone in attendance.

“Am I boring you, Johnson?” Here’s another fun fact: Zippia reports that 39% of employees surveyed have slept during a work meeting.

Yikes, it’s probably safe to count in-meeting ZZZZs as a negative KPI. So let’s consider this as a wakeup call regarding the costly and widespread problem of unnecessary meetings.

13 of the most common meeting mistakes

The leading cause of unnecessary meetings is a big-picture one: failure to have a clear framework for what requires a meeting and what doesn’t.

Have you ever found yourself in a workplace meeting where the central issue was something from this list of functions?

• Getting/exchanging feedback
• Sharing information
• Sharing status updates that don’t require action
• Work-related issues with no clear goals or outcomes
• Topics for which there have been no changes since the last meeting

None of which actually require a meeting.

Samewave, a business management software firm focused on “banishing bad meetings,” notes that the list of common workplace meeting mistakes also includes:

• Too many meetings
• No meeting agenda
• Starting late or slowly
• Lack of ground rules
• Lack of participation
• Getting off topic
• Running over the allotted time
• Holding “standing” meetings regardless of need

9 tips to avoid meetings that could have been emails

Throughout the business world, the most common “good meeting vs. bad meeting” litmus test is expressed in the post-mortem observation: “Well, that could have been an email.”

If you search online for meeting productivity tips, the email vs. in-person theme is ubiquitous — generating articles in publications ranging from remote work platform provider Friday and ClickMeeting to Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. 

The concept has even launched an online marketplace of T-shirts, notebooks, coffee mugs and memes emblazoned with lighthearted “I Survived Another Meeting that Should Have Been an Email” messaging. 

Here are some of the most oft-cited tips for avoiding unproductive, “could’ve been an email” type meetings:

1. Be more judicious about which issues require real-time communication with multiple people vs. “asynchronous communication.”
2. Avoid holding meetings just for status updates and information sharing.
3. Invite fewer people to keep things focused without wasting time for others.
4. Declare specific “No Meeting Mornings” or days of the week.
5. Train your leaders to run more effective meetings.
6. Make sure your virtual meeting technology is not slowing you down (41% of meetings experience tech or connectivity issues).
7. Have an agenda!
8. Keep meetings short.
9. Ask team members for feedback

Meeting or email?

Sounding a bit like an ancient aphorism adjusted for the modern workplace.

Doist’s “meeting vs. email” formulas include equations for:

• Doing the math on the true cost of meetings, and
• Accounting for meeting “blast radius” (productivity cost of interruptions and context switching that bookend a meeting)