I stepped into the hot seat for this podcast to address an issue that many workplace leaders are living, day to day, week to week, and endless month after endless month at the moment. The trudgery of far too many meetings.
It seems important to do better for ourselves and our teams. We’ve heard it said, “You’ve only got one back”. We’ve also only got one body, one life and one job.
I don’t consider it OK that leaders and teams keep dragging themselves through the mud with meeting after meeting after endless meeting. We can do better.
And in fact, when we do better, incredible things happen. I share research in this podcast that is nothing short of incredible. You could achieve amazing things for your team by reducing the number of meetings in an average week (and changing when they happen).
In this episode I give details about where to look to make improvements, and how to get started. Enjoy.
“65% of senior managers have said that meetings stop them from completing their work. Perhaps even more importantly, how people feel about meetings is directly correlated with job satisfaction. This is true, even after controlling for personality traits, and environmental factors such as work design, supervision and pay.
It’s extremely exciting what can be achieved by reducing meetings. If you have one day per week that is meeting free, people experience an increase in autonomy of 63% and autonomy is extremely motivating for most people.”
Nina Fountain
Key moments
0:50 – Work Nina does with teams to improve their organisations
3:09 – Common myths around workplace strategy
3:33 – How Nina transitioned from Health Science into Business
5:15 – How bad is meeting overload?
6:38 – Statistics around the positive impact of reducing meetings
8:44 – The role of communication in remote working
12:16 – Information flow for hybrid work influences the number of meetings
15:24 – Addressing information flow issues
16:08 – Understanding which meetings to cut
17:45 – Understanding how information is relayed to and from the team
Resources mentioned in the show
University of Reading (UK) January 2007 – the Surprising Impact of Meeting Free Days
The Workplace Makers podcast explores workplace making – building modern workplaces that people are drawn to, wherever they work from
Workplace Makers – the podcast about people building workplaces that attract a crowd
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