3 Reasons to Avoid Taking Meetings

Does the thought of attending a meeting make you sigh with annoyance?

The feeling that meetings are the bane of one’s work life is commonplace all around the world. But we can’t do away with them entirely. Meetings are billed as an opportunity to come together with your colleagues and discuss problems, potential solutions, or simply provide updates on projects.

The problem arises when they aren’t structured and waste time. There are few things as unproductive as coming in person for a meeting when all you need is a quick phone call or to send an email.

In fact, now that we live in a world where smartphones are widely available and online tools are prolific, it makes little sense to have meetings the way we’re used to.

Let’s explore the reasons why you should avoid meetings. If you’re a leader or a business owner, these pointers will motivate you to remove unproductive meetings. You’ll create more time and energy and a happier work environment too.

Meetings don’t engage everyone

You very likely have a lot of talented people on your team. But you wouldn’t know if you only relied on physical and virtual meetings to get feedback and ideas.

Many people have creative ideas to share but they don’t thrive in group settings or in meetings where they’re uncomfortable with speaking up.

One solution is to offer training to your team members to build confidence and share ideas more. But you can also offer alternatives to meetings by creating feedback forms, Slack channels for open discussions, and encouraging DMs and direct emails to your inbox.

When you create more opportunities for people to pitch in, you’ll get more input that can help your business grow.

But you do have to respond and encourage your team members or employees to use the channels available. And give praise and recognition to people who do share their thoughts. Seeing your encouragement, more people will start to participate in earnest.

Meetings add more tasks

Think about meetings you’ve held in the past. Did you have to follow them up with emails, chat messages, and by setting up tasks on Asana or Trello? If you did, then you created unnecessary extra work for yourself and others.

If you have to rely on written communication and digital tools to follow up your meetings, then you might as well avoid such meetings altogether.

However, if you’re just onboarding a new hire or starting a new work process, then having meetings at first makes sense. You need to ensure that everyone knows how the new workflow works and that they get a live demonstration.

But at some point, you need to stop having meetings and just let people on new tasks by following up on emails, Asana tasks, and chat messages. As you’ll see in the next section, this reinforces self-accountability.

Meetings reduce personal accountability

Meetings are meant to provide updates and to provide answers that need real-time feedback and demonstrations.

But they should never become a way to make people accountable for their work on a regular basis. While you should have one-on-one meetings with team members who are clearly struggling, meetings should not be a place to publicly correct an individual’s work.

Look for ways to track tasks and get feedback from your team on the work that they’re doing.

In my business, we simply assign new tasks to Asana and create subtasks with smaller objectives.

Whenever there’s a problem, people reach out on company-wide or time-wide channels and bring it up. We’re able to document and respond to such issues immediately instead of waiting for a meeting to clear things up.

Avoid taking meetings often so that people don’t feel like you’re always looking over their shoulder. By setting up a workflow that uses project management tools and online communication instead, you’ll create a way for people to be accountable on their own.

Conclusion

Meetings don’t have to be a ‘necessary evil’. With the digital tools and devices we have today, we can communicate at home or while we’re on the go.

We also have ways to track each other’s work in a transparent way by using project management tools and chat platforms like Slack.

You need to make sure that there’s a clear workflow and that people know what they’re doing and why. Then, when you do have meetings, you can only focus on unusual matters that really need attention.

In this way, meetings become informative, short, and productive, and a small part of your entire work process. You and your workmates will be free to focus on your tasks and channel your energy into more productive work.