There’s a meeting apocalypse coming soon
Teams have too many meetings
Obviously, meeting with our team members is important.
Our teams need to have a shared vision for the future. Our people need to align together on goals. Leaders need to be kept up to speed on what’s going on so they can drive strategy, make decisions, and support their people. And everyone, at every level, just needs to know what’s going on. Right?
Most people agree that all of those things are great and important. And how do we do these things on teams? Meetings, email, and chat.
Sharing information is important.
But how important? What is the true cost of this universal-awareness?
Did you know that according to McKinsey & Company,
workers spend 68% of their time in meetings, email, & chat?
That’s right! According to the McKinsey Global Institute, the average knowledge-worker spends 40% of their time in meetings. Additionally, workers surveyed spend 28% of their time reading and writing email and chat messages. Together, that’s 68% of team time spent in meetings and working with email and chat every single week!
Microsoft came to a similar conclusion reporting that
team communication consumes near 2/3 of the week.
A separate study from Microsoft, which included data from millions of workers, revealed similar findings. This research showed that 57% of workers’ time is spent in email and in meetings. That percentage doesn’t include communication via in person conversation or instant messaging. So the real time that teams spend keeping each other informed is actually higher.
As teams get larger and as leaders rise in level, the amount of time spent on raw communication increases… often eventually consuming leaders’ entire work week. For the rest of the team, it’s also getting worse. COVID-19 and the rise of remote or hybrid teams is also having an impact.
New estimates are showing signs that
time spent sharing information might now be as high as 80%
All of that meeting and email sharing of information is important. But is it worth 80% of your team’s energy – while, meanwhile, you spend a mere 20% of your time creating real, tangible value for your customers?
Maybe not. But don’t worry – A.I. will cut us free from these meeting shackles.
There’s a lot of debate about what A.I. can do. Is it hype? Is it a step-change for humanity? Is it sentient? Will it kill us? All of those are valid questions and our teams will gradually get to the bottom of each of them.
But one thing is already certain.
A.I. is great at summarizing conversations.
Here’s how that will save us from meeting overload…
Step 1: Teams will add a meeting summary tool to meetings.
At Google Cloud Next, Google introduced Duet AI. Zoom also recently announced AI meeting notes and Microsoft Teams has AI summary too. Even if your meeting tool of choice doesn’t have AI summary functionality built-in (yet), the Internet abounds with plugins ready to join your meetings with (or without) you. There’s Otter, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, Superpowered, and dozens more.
Step 2: People on your team will start opting out of meetings
You may have already noticed that when an AllHands meeting, a large recurring status meeting, or a training session happens, people’s behavior is changing. If it’s recorded and the video is provided later, then an increasing number of participants are opting out of the live session. They watch the video later.
Your team members are already opting out of live meetings. Artificial Intelligence is going to make that even easier for them. So should you allow this? Instinctively you might be tempted to say, “No!” But watching a recording of a meeting, might bring more valuable benefits than most people realize.
In training or information-sharing sessions, retention improves when an audience is able to pause and rewind the recording in order to make sure to catch key points, confusing bits, or complex data. (Salmon Khan explains why recording is better than live sessions for learning in his original TedTalk).
Additionally, when the recorded video is provided for after-meeting viewing, the viewer can watch at an accelerated speed so that being informed doesn’t take quite as much of our valuable time.
Those things are already happening with video. Next, wouldn’t it be great if you got to see a clear and accurate summary of what was discussed, before watching a meeting? Wouldn’t it be great if you had the CliffsNotes for every meeting before you watched the recording? That’s coming soon, thanks to A.I.
Step 3, 4, 5, & 6: More impactful enhancements are just on the horizon.
Sadly, steps 1 & 2 don’t solve the whole problem.
There are still meetings that we all need to attend – because we need to contribute to them. We’re not just listening. We have questions. We have opinions. We have things to say.
It’s too early to declare a meeting-apocalypse
(but it is coming soon).
With A.I. and the Future of Teams, we’re just getting started. There are things in the works that will improve the participation side of communication overload too! And I’ll tell you all about Steps 3 through 6 in the rest of this Meeting Apocalypse blog post series.