It doesn’t matter if it’s in the office or on a video call. Meetings, with a few obvious exceptions, are tedious. Even more so when they happen very regularly. It’s a thought that many of us have had for years, given that at the end of the day, we They force us to stop everything we are doing.
The best of all is that it is not just an idea, but a proven fact thanks to studies like those of Microsoft, which have reached the clear conclusion that there are too many meetings. And even if we are talking about a Big Tech Companiescan be applicable to many companies. Steve Jobs had already predicted it a long time ago…
We gather beyond our means
Since 2020, due to the pandemic, the number of employees working remotely has increased considerably. Without going any further, in USA the figure continues to grow with an increase of almost 20% last year, with more than 3 million people teleworking.
These figures, which vary little on a global scale, are in no way negative for those who work from home. In fact, there is greater dissatisfaction among those who have had to return to the face-to-face format. However, teleworking has a clearly negative consequence: the uncontrolled multiplication of meetings.
Based on Teams data, Microsoft estimated the number of meetings taking place via video calls, showing that Virtual meetings increased by 153% since the pandemic. Figures that continue to grow and show that ultimately meetings slow down work.
And there are many workers whose workday is interrupted by meetings that, more or less important, slow down their productivity. In this way, there are those who inevitably have to extend their workday to give them time to complete their real work beyond the meetings.
In the end, Steve Jobs was right
Steve Jobs explains in his authorized biography (by Walter Isaacson) why he hated meetings
This Microsoft study, like many other analyses of this situation, ends up proving Steve Jobs right. The Apple co-founder had already predicted these problems almost 40 years ago.
Jobs had already made it clear that Meetings slowed productivity and killed creativity. He made this known on internal forums and also recounted it in his authorized biography, written by Walter Isaacson:
“Meetings are one of the worst things in today’s business world. They’re terrible. Meetings interrupt work, they interrupt momentum, they kill creativity. And they’re hours and hours of wasted time.”
So much so that since his time at NeXT and his very recent return to Apple in the late 90s, he has instituted a weekly day without meetings: Thursday. I understood that they were ultimately necessary, even if I also wanted them workers could have a day entirely and exclusively devoted to their own work without having to interrupt them at any time due to a meeting.
By | Xataka
Cover image | Wikimedia Commons
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