Rethinking the meeting mindset: How to decide if you actually need a meeting

Recent data suggests that almost a third of weekly meetings are unnecessary. While no one seems to enjoy them, it can be difficult to avoid meeting traps when your only communication options are typing up an email, sending a Slack message, or holding a meeting.

It’s simply all too easy to get burned out, and meeting fatigue is a growing problem that makes it harder for your team to succeed. Extraneous meetings aren’t only inefficient, especially when considering the time required to refocus after the unnecessary disruption, but they’re also costly: US businesses report spending a whopping $37 billion on them annually.

Emails are often equally ineffective, particularly around complex topics. Teams lose thousands of dollars annually because of poorly-written communications. When you need to relay an important message, emails simply are not reliable enough to replace meetings.

It’s clear that what we’re doing isn’t working. Luckily, there is a better way to work together and share information: visual collaboration. 

Visual collaboration helps teams capture feedback, share ideas, and clarify complex topics in a way that text-based communication (like emails) or verbal communication (like meetings) can’t.

With the power of visuals, you may find answering the question, “Do you really need a meeting?” easier than ever. 

To meet or not to meet

The goal isn’t to eliminate meetings altogether, but rather to approach them strategically, in a way that’s most effective to achieve a desired outcome. A recent experiment conducted at Asana supports this idea. It found that only 30% of time savings comes from canceling meetings entirely. The other 70% comes from redesigning meetings—maybe by defining clearer goals, narrowing down the attendees, or transitioning to an asynchronous format. 

If you’re embracing visual collaboration, you should regularly be questioning if you’re approaching problems from a perspective that truly fosters everyone’s best work—meetings or otherwise. 

So, what does call for a meeting?

There are several things to keep in mind as you determine the best method of communicating with your team:

1. Sensitivity

What is the topic of the communication you’re trying to facilitate? If a conversation could be emotional or controversial, it’s best not to leave its interpretation to written text. You really need to rely on nonverbal cues, like body language and facial expressions, to convey meaning and avoid misunderstandings. If a topic is sensitive, consider a meeting over an asynchronous format.

2. Urgency

How urgent is the topic you want to discuss? Asynchronous communication has a tendency to introduce latency, so if you need to resolve something quickly, a meeting may be the best choice.

Recurring coffee chats or check-ins typically aren’t urgent whatsoever. In fact, these types of casual, recurring meetings tend to be one of the most significant contributors to meeting fatigue, even if they were valuable at one point. If non-urgent recurring meetings are never questioned, they can become a major time sink for your team.

3. Complexity

How complex is the information you’re trying to convey? 

This is the place many people get stuck.

We’ve all received messages saying something along the lines of, “It’s too hard to type out. Can you hop on a call?” A complex topic is traditionally an automatic justification for a meeting—but should it be?

Visual collaboration fills the communication gap that is left by other tools and software (for example, Slack may help you communicate quickly, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce complexity). With visuals, you can quickly convey complex processes, systems, or plans. And while it won’t eliminate all your meetings, visual collaboration increases the threshold you need to reach before something becomes too complex to communicate asynchronously.

4. Goals

What’s the ideal end result of this communication? 

We often resort to default communication habits without strategically considering our goals for the interaction, much less the most efficient way to reach those goals. Teams must intentionally think through their desired outcome for each interaction and decide whether a meeting is the best means of facilitating it—maybe an email or Slack message really would accomplish your goals just as well. Perhaps the frequency of a meeting could be questioned. Or, it’s possible that opting for an asynchronous visual collaboration activity would fulfill the purpose of the meeting even better (and more efficiently) than the actual meeting would.

We aren’t suggesting that sharing feedback, updates, and ideas isn’t valuable—it undeniably is. There just may be a more effective approach than you’re currently considering. Again, the goal is intentionality. Strategically design interactions to achieve specific, desired outcomes. 

La carte mentale, carte heuristique ou encore mind map en anglais, est un outil pratique et intuitif qui permet de visualiser des idées et des concepts en s'affranchissant des limites imposées par les structures linéaires. Généralement créée autour d'une idée ou d'un objectif principal situé au centre, des lignes (branches) le relie à des thèmes associés, puis vers des éléments plus précis. 

Firms adopting customer intimacy as their value discipline strongly emphasize understanding and catering to individual customers' specific needs and preferences. 

Businesses that prioritize product leadership aim to create and offer the most innovative and cutting-edge products or services in their market. 

Companies pursuing operational excellence focus on delivering products or services at the lowest cost and with the highest efficiency in the industry. 

1. ZoomオンラインWeb会議ツール
2. ビジネスチャット「Slack」
3. 資料・作図作成ツール「Lucidchart」
4. 社内情報共有なら「Confluence」
5. 社内ITサポートツール「TeamViewer」
6. オンラインホワイトボード「Lucidspark」
7. プロジェクト管理ツール「Asana」
8. 勤怠管理システム「Kincone」
9. ナレッジ共有ツール「NotePM」
10. 電子印鑑GMOサイン

A user persona is a fictional representation of your actual users that helps guide the design process. The goal of creating user personas is to help designers create and build a product that users actually want to use while standardizing the creation process.