Meeting Overload Isn’t the Real Problem

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Meeting Overload Isn’t the Real Problem - Bad Meeting Design Is

Productivity

Meetings

When meeting overload becomes obvious, there are soma small changes that can transform your entire meeting culture.

Elise Keith

June 24, 2025

5 min read

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Meeting overload has become the norm over the past five years. Remote work, post-COVID shifts, and economic uncertainty pushed teams to meet more, faster… and with less clarity. While it's now common to hear "meetings are a waste of time," you rarely hear anyone suggest we need to get better at running them.

The default reaction? Blame the meeting. Cancel it. Move it to Slack.

But maybe the real problem isn't too many meetings – it's how we run them.

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We accept bad meetings as normal

Here's the uncomfortable truth: we spend hours in meetings each week and often walk away feeling it wasn't productive. But unproductive meetings don't mean meetings are inherently bad – it means we've accepted a lousy standard.

When you're in a meeting that feels off, is that true for everyone? Or just you that day? We throw around ideas like "meetings are half unproductive," but what does that mean? Half of the meetings? Half the people? Half the energy missing?

The real issue? We rarely talk about it. We assume "that's just how it is." As long as you leave it there, bad meetings will continue.

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How to increase meeting productivity? Start by asking

You might think, “how was the meeting?” would help, but it depends on how you ask, who asks, and what you do with the answer. If a senior leader who dominates the room asks for feedback, chances are no one will risk telling the truth.

Instead, create a safe feedback loop. Try something like:

"Was this a good use of your time? Scale from 0 to 5:

0 = No way, I shouldn't be in this meeting
3 = Yeah, it was fine, but could be better
5 = I'm so glad we did this. I'm energized!"

This scale gives people freedom to be honest. Follow up with: "If this wasn't great, what's one thing we can change for next time?"

Then actually do it. That's how trust and improvement start. Skip those long post-meeting surveys – people are drowning in them. Collect feedback live. Talk about the meeting during the meeting.

Once feedback culture takes root, you can tackle meeting culture systematically through meeting hygiene.

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Building healthy meeting culture through design

It's not just about running one good meeting – it's about making all meetings healthier by design. This means being intentional about how often you meet, what kinds of meetings you run, and how you structure them.

The teams that get it right – companies like Doist, Zapier, and GitLab – aren't winging it. They've made deliberate decisions about which meetings they need, how often, and how those meetings should run. That's meeting hygiene: a clearly defined system that helps people work better together without meetings taking over their lives.

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How many meetings are too many? It depends

It’s tempting to blame meeting overload on the sheer number of calls crowding our calendars. But the truth is, the cadence of meetings – how often and how long they happen – depends on multiple factors:

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1. Speed requirements

If your team only checks in on a project every two months, that project’s going to move slowly. Regular interaction accelerates progress. A startup launching in six weeks needs daily standups. A research team with quarterly deliverables might thrive with weekly check-ins.
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2. Your operating environment

A team navigating a stable, predictable workload doesn’t need the same cadence as one tackling constant changes, launches, or cross-functional chaos. Urgency requires a tighter rhythm.
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3. Your role

meeting overload per role — *MeetGeek* *data on average meeting count and duration per role*

People in individual contributor roles – those doing the writing, building, designing – tend to do best with 2–3 focused meetings per week – just enough to stay aligned without breaking their flow.

Now, if you're in leadership? Your job is primarily to meet. Whether it's setting vision, onboarding leaders, impressing the board, or making decisions – most of that happens in meetings. The higher you go, the more your calendar fills up. Some executives spend up to 80–90% of their time in meetings by design.

The question isn't "how many meetings are too many?" It's: "Does our cadence match our goals, environment, and work?"

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How to reduce unnecessary meetings: fix the usual suspects

That’s where many teams go wrong – and why some meeting types have earned a bad reputation. It’s not because they’re inherently useless. It’s because we often run them on autopilot, without intention or feedback.

Let's examine one of the most problematic meeting types:

Recurring check-ins
Status updates
All-hands

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Keep recurring meetings relevant

Recurring meetings fall into disgrace because they slide into unconscious habits. Once calendared, they stay forever. No one remembers why they started or wants to question their existence.

The fix: Every recurring meeting should come with an expiration date.

Set them for maximum three months, then stop and revisit. Ask: is this still serving the team? If yes, great – reschedule it. If not, let it go.

Here’s my favorite structure for a weekly team meeting that actually works:

A check-in at the beginning, so that everybody engages within the first five minutes.
A lightning-quick review of progress – glance at the dashboard, without dwelling – the main point is shared awareness.
A real-time agenda, built on the spot. Each person lists what’s in their way right now – issues, questions, tensions – and the group picks which ones to solve. This makes the conversation fresh and relevant every time.
Wrap with clarity - when you get close to time being up, take the last 10 minutes to get clear: What decisions were made? What are the next steps? What needs to be shared with other teams?

This approach balances consistency with urgency, focusing only on work needing attention.

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Status meetings need purpose beyond updates

A lot of companies ditch status update meetings, because they believe they can be easily replaced by emails, Slack threads, Microsoft Teams updates, or other async tools they use. And they're often right.

If your status meeting is literally just reading down what everyone has done – “I did this, now I’m gonna do that, and I feel this way about it” – and you’re not doing anything with that information, then it should be async.

But here’s the nuance: sometimes teams keep these meetings on the calendar not because they love them, but because they work as a forcing function. When you know you have to say out loud what you’ve done in front of your team, you're more likely to actually do it. That real-time accountability can be powerful – but if that’s all you’re using the meeting for, find more efficient alternatives.

When done right, status meetings build relationships, strengthen trust, and surface small signals that keep teams aligned.

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All-hands meetings that actually engage

All-hands meetings are supposed to bring everyone together. Big picture updates, company milestones, culture moments – sounds good in theory. But in practice? They often fall flat. And the reason is simple: low engagement.

In all-hands, leadership is often “doing whatever they’re doing” – but how are people asking questions? How are they signaling interest, agreement, concern? If your format doesn’t support that interaction, you lose the room.

The fix: Make it interactive. Use chats, polls, sticky notes, colored cards people can wave, even stand-up or sit-down cues. When you adapt them to fit your culture, they make the meeting feel alive and participatory.

But the most important trick? Break up large groups frequently. You can't expect 500, or even 50, people to all engage in a single shared conversation. So split the large group into smaller ones, and do it often.

Most importantly: create opportunities for people to talk to each other, not just be talked at.

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7 quick changes to transform your meeting culture

When meeting overload becomes obvious, the first instinct is usually to measure how much time people are spending in meetings. With a bit of training, you can often cut 30–40% of that time. But the more important question is: are these meetings actually helping people do their jobs?

The real transformation doesn’t come from cutting time – it comes from changing how meetings are run.

Practice	Core idea
1. Set clear expectations upfront	Clarify the meeting’s purpose, participants' roles, and expected outcomes.
2. Name meetings by their purpose	Use specific titles to avoid confusion and invite relevance.
3. Lead with purpose, not just agenda	Purpose and outcomes matter more than listing topics; avoid “laundry list” meetings.
4. Create real engagement	Engagement = active participation (e.g., asking, solving, voting) – not just turning cameras on.
5. Make meetings truly optional	Let people skip irrelevant meetings without guilt. Train for boundary-setting and clarity.
6. Take and share notes	Document and share what happened to reinforce memory and ensure transparency.
7. Follow through on commitments	Stick to what you promised – end on time, make decisions, and take action.

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Small changes to how you run meetings can transform your entire meeting culture:

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1. Set clear expectations upfront

People need to know what the meeting is about, what their role is, and what we're meant to accomplish. That clarity makes the meeting relevant – and relevance is what gets people to show up with energy, not obligation.

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2. Name meetings by their purpose

Ditch vague meeting titles like "budget meeting." What does that even mean? Are we reviewing the budget? Approving it? Fixing something broken?

Instead of: “Budget meeting”
Try: “Approve Q3 marketing budget increase

Now everyone knows exactly what's happening. If someone doesn't need to weigh in on marketing spend, they can skip it. No more sitting through irrelevant meetings just because you're afraid you'll miss something important.

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3. Lead with purpose, not agenda.

Agendas are helpful – but they’re not the key. A good agenda simply gives people a high-level view of how you plan to get from A to B. The real key is having a clear purpose and expected outcome. Without that, you end up with a “laundry list” of topics – a little lunch talk, a new site update, a few scattered project notes – and no decisions, no next steps, no clarity. It feels productive, but it’s not.

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4. Create real engagement

Doesn't matter how charismatic you are – if people are checking email off-camera, they're not participating. And "cameras on" doesn't guarantee engagement either. Engagement means people are doing something: contributing, asking, solving, voting, participating in ways that move the meeting forward.

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5. Make meetings truly optional

When meetings aren't clearly designed or communicated, people join for the wrong reasons. Not because they know they're needed, but because they're afraid they might be. That's meeting FOMO. Make it culturally acceptable to opt out. Give explicit permission. Then help people do it gracefully – that takes training, because it's about maintaining relationships while setting boundaries.

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6. Take and share notes.

Share what happened. Be transparent. Not just for people who missed the meeting, but for everyone who was there but can't remember what went down in meeting #42 from last week. We're all drowning in notifications – our brains need backup. Written meeting notes are that backup.

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7. Follow through on what you said would happen.

If you promised the meeting ends at noon, wrap it up at noon. If you said there'd be a decision by the end, make that decision happen. Sounds basic, right? But it requires actual skill to pull off – and most companies never bother teaching anyone how to do it. That's leaving results on the table.

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Closing thoughts

Here's what leaders miss: meetings aren't just about productivity – they're where culture becomes visible. When people leave energized about working together, that ripples through retention, innovation, and the speed of execution.

But when meetings consistently waste time or leave people unheard, that ripples too. Bad meeting hangovers last for days.

You can keep accepting lousy meetings as "just how work is," or recognize this as one of the highest-leverage investments in team success.

Great meetings don't happen by accident – they're designed. Start with one thing – maybe it's renaming your meetings to be purpose-clear. Ask for feedback out loud. Focus on engagement over information transfer.

In a world where teams need to adapt faster than ever, where remote and hybrid work require more intentional connection, where the pace of change demands constant alignment – the question is whether you can afford not to.

Article updated on

June 24, 2025

Share the knowledge with your circle

Copied

Meeting Overload Isn’t the Real Problem - Bad Meeting Design Is

When meeting overload becomes obvious, there are soma small changes that can transform your entire meeting culture.

Meeting Overload Isn’t the Real Problem - Bad Meeting Design Is

We accept bad meetings as normal

How to increase meeting productivity? Start by asking

Building healthy meeting culture through design

How many meetings are too many? It depends

1. Speed requirements

2. Your operating environment

3. Your role

How to reduce unnecessary meetings: fix the usual suspects

Keep recurring meetings relevant

Status meetings need purpose beyond updates

All-hands meetings that actually engage

7 quick changes to transform your meeting culture

Closing thoughts

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