According to this article (hbr) I read a few weeks ago, managers agree that 83% of meetings are unproductive, to say the least.

well, I guess all we agree. But despite what seems to be an overwhelming consensus, endless check-ins, debriefs, all-staffs, and Meet/Zoom calls continue to plague the corporate world.

A few months ago, I found myself in the very same overwhelming situation, and decided to change radically my behavior.

I was not able anymore to speak with the team, go for a lunch, have a chat with colleagues from a different department just to, you know, chat about weather, Italian food, best coffee making techniques and alike.

Below, I want to summarize the most common psychological pitfalls that lead us to hold and attend more meetings than we should, and offer some strategies to help employees, managers, and entire organizations overcome them.

1. Meeting FOMO (Fear of Missing out)
2. Selfish Urgency
3. Meetings as Commitment Devices
4. The Mere Urgency Effect
5. Meeting Amnesia

1. Meeting FOMO (Fear of Missing out)

As meeting participants, we worry that our colleagues will judge us (or worse yet, forget about us) if we don’t accept every invitation. Interestingly, meeting FOMO isn’t limited to attendees: it can affect organizers as well, resulting in excessively inflated invite lists. If you’re leading a meeting, remember that leaving someone out isn’t an insult if the meeting isn’t relevant to them, and that it’s actually more respectful to acknowledge when a meeting would be a waste of their time.

As the meeting leader, it’s up to you to do your part to address participants’ FOMO concerns:

• communicate very clearly when an invitation is optional and why
• if some employees aren’t included, make it clear that you appreciate their advice, and have only kept them off the list because you think their time would be better spent on other priorities
•  Research has shown that the most productive employees attend fewer meetings and protect their calendars for deep work
• the best way to help your team overcome meeting FOMO is to model healthy engagement yourself: visibly decline meetings yourself and block off deep focus time, and make it public.

2. Selfish Urgency

When it comes to meetings, this bias yields a phenomenon that we call “selfish urgency”: leaders will schedule meetings whenever convenient for them, without necessarily considering their teams’ needs or schedules. Sometimes leaders even knowingly schedule meetings when their team has conflicts, forcing everyone to shift their calendars around to accommodate.

A few suggestions to limit this mindset:

• try to calculates a monetary cost per meeting, especially if you are all about efficiency
• talk to your team to find out how meetings are impacting their personal and professional lives
• Instead of interrupting people’s workflows with a last-minute invite, try to schedule meetings in advance.
• consider shortening or cancelling a meeting altogether if the benefits don’t seem to outweigh the downsides.

3. Meetings as Commitment Devices

Sometimes we use meetings as commitment devices: basically, just to make sure people follow through on their promises (what more effective than a meeting with your boss to complete the slide you are preparing) but the meeting itself is often unnecessary, with people simply reporting on how they did or didn’t achieve the target.

To avoid those meetings:

• tell your team in advance that the meeting will be cancelled if the deadline is met (if the work isn’t done in time, the meeting will likely still be helpful — if the work is done, send a congratulatory email and save everyone an hour)

4. The Mere Urgency Effect

When we are stressed, completing seemingly urgent (yet actually unimportant) tasks can provide some relief.

This is known as the Mere Urgency Effect. (here to read more) : it is a tendency to pursue urgency over importance.

Specifically, people are more likely to perform unimportant tasks over important tasks, when the unimportant tasks are characterized merely by spurious urgency.

Scheduling and attending meetings can make us feel like we’ve accomplished something, and so we’re often loath to decline or cancel them, even if they are objectively not as important as our other work. This is often compounded by a strong sense of inertia: If we’ve always held a certain meeting at a certain time, it’s a lot easier to just keep doing that than to reevaluate whether it’s actually a good idea.

The solution?

• Make cancelling or ending early the default, especially for recurring meetings. Instead of asking, “Does anyone have any updates,” say, “Unless anyone has anything new, let’s cancel and we can all get an hour back.”
• If you aren’t sure if a meeting is necessary, try not having it and see what happens! Make it a regular practice in recurring meetings to ask whether you need the next one

5. Meeting Amnesia

Often we simply end up in the same bad meeting over and over again, just because no one remembers what was discussed in the last meeting. To avoid meeting amnesia:

• schedule a short five-minute team debrief after key meetings
• make it routine to keep track of what was said, and to share those summaries with attendees and any relevant stakeholders who weren’t present. The point is to provide a concise summary of the key points and action items
• As a side benefit, periodically reviewing this summary can also help decide whether these meetings are productive, and whether it may make sense to cancel or shorten the next one

Finally, here there are 5 suspicious fact that could anticipate a bad meeting:

• There are no agenda items (people have run through agenda items in their heads)
• The meeting organizer hasn’t set a clear goal
• There is no official note-taker (good meeting notes can actually improve understanding of key topics)
• The meeting lead is low energy (energy is the key ingredient to effective leadership, according to a Forbes article)
• There are no decision-makers attending

Do you see yourself in one of those 5 pattern work behavior?

What can you do as a leader do to stop bad habits?