Adam Grant, host of WorkLife podcast, explores the frustrations of workplace meetings, their negative impact on productivity, and strategies to improve them. He discusses the history of meetings and challenges the norms surrounding them. The chapter also introduces the concept of Meeting Doomsday, where organizations reset their calendars to combat meeting bloat. Restructuring and eliminating unnecessary meetings leads to better work and better work days.
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Quick takeaways
The quality of meetings, not meetings themselves, determines their outcome and almost a third of meetings are unnecessary, wasting millions of dollars.
By implementing intentional meeting changes, such as deleting unnecessary meetings, organizations can reduce meeting bloat, save time, and improve overall productivity.
Deep dives
Meetings are a source of misery
Meetings are unproductive, awkward, and exhausting, leading to burnout and decreased productivity.
The importance of meeting quality
The quality of meetings, not meetings themselves, determines their outcome. Almost a third of meetings are unnecessary, wasting millions of dollars.
Improving meeting norms
To have better meetings, organizations must rethink their meeting norms. This includes determining when meetings are necessary, reconsidering their duration, inviting only relevant participants, and framing agendas as a set of questions to encourage active participation.
The power of changing meeting practices
By implementing intentional meeting changes, such as deleting unnecessary meetings, restructuring agendas, and fostering active participation, organizations can reduce meeting bloat, save time, and improve overall productivity.
WorkLife with Adam Grant, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective is back! This season, Adam takes a look at how to find meaningful work and how to make jobs more energizing. In this first episode: meetings. Meetings often drain our joy and sap our focus — and meeting overload kills productivity. So why do we have so many of them — and is a better world possible? Adam investigates the science of improving meetings and explores how workplaces are fighting meeting bloat. Available transcripts for WorkLife can be found at go.ted.com/WLtranscripts
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