This could have been an email. ~ Everyone π
Meetings are often seen as preventing people from doing meaningful work when really, meetings are processes that (should) enable work. Most companies just don't define what a valuable, meaningful, good meeting looks like.
As a result, your time often isnβt respected (and you may not respect other people's time) the way it should be. You are likely spending at least 60% of your time in meetings of varying quality. You should **spend **at least 60% of your time in deep work, and the meetings that are part of that remaining time should enable you to do those 60% as best you can.
Add to this the additional challenge of digital meetings over video chat. Zoom fatigue is a term that gets thrown around a lot as an argument for less meetings. Anecdotes aside, this phenomenon has been studied and boils down to a few factors:
Resisting multi-tasking.
Chronic gaze.
Stimulus overload (self-view).
Misattributed delays.
Poor meeting skills.
So, the best leverage point for efficiency, decision-making, and information flow within any company is to optimize for all of these things. We can sum this up in two categories:
**what should/shouldn't be a meeting**
, and**what good meetings look like**
.This is important not least because perceived meeting quality (or PMQ) impacts job satisfaction and engagement. Engagement, along with performance, are the top 2 metrics that mark a good employee experience at Juro. So optimizing this is in everyone's interest.
What should be a meeting at all? Here is a flowchart to show you how we think about it, taken from Jurorsβ suggestions and other charts around the web. Use the overview below as guidance β never rules.
Rule of thumb, if it's a (mostly) one-sided update where no decisions need to be made, it should be asynchronous (e.g. a video recording via Loom):