{"id":175410,"date":"2020-08-07T08:37:23","date_gmt":"2020-08-07T15:37:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/readwrite.com\/?p=175410"},"modified":"2020-08-07T08:37:23","modified_gmt":"2020-08-07T15:37:23","slug":"death-of-meetings-how-new-forms-of-collaboration-are-taking-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/readwrite.com\/death-of-meetings-how-new-forms-of-collaboration-are-taking-over\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death of Meetings: How New Forms of Collaboration Are Taking Over"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve ever been stuck in a two-hour meeting with nothing to contribute and nothing to learn, you\u2019ve felt the pain of inefficient meetings\u2014and you\u2019ll be happy to hear that these days of <\/span>wasted time<\/span><\/a> and mismanaged resources may soon be over.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not quite accurate to say that meetings are dead, or even that they\u2019re dying, since even if they decline in public favor for the foreseeable future, they\u2019ll never completely go away. But we are seeing a massive reduction in the number of meetings held, the length of those meetings, and the number of participants included\u2014and public attitudes about meetings are drastically changing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Meetings and Time Waste<\/b><\/p>\n

Meetings waste time in almost every scenario, for one reason or another, and Americans are starting to wake up to this reality. <\/span>More than two-thirds of American workers<\/span><\/a> claim that too much time in meetings is distracting, preventing them from accomplishing their core responsibilities. And participants in meetings feel that as much as a <\/span>third of all meeting time is a total waste<\/span><\/a>, exacerbated by the fact that 63 percent of meetings are held without a pre-planned agenda.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This problem of time waste is compounded by several factors. First, the sheer number of meetings held; there are more than 11 million meetings per day, and in many organizations, meetings are held for even the smallest matters. Each meeting includes multiple participants, multiplying the man-hours necessary to carry it out, and in many cases those participants are unnecessary. And of course, extra-long meetings multiply all these factors even further.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

See this math in action<\/span><\/a>; if your company has 100 employees making $60,000 per year with 60 meetings per month, the total cost of meetings per year is $2.25 million. Is that really worth the insights you glean from daily updates?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For the last several years, executives have been waking up to this reality and curtailing their meeting habits, but an even more powerful force is influencing meeting norms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Last Nail in the Coffin\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The <\/span>COVID-19 pandemic<\/span><\/a> forced businesses all over the country to <\/span>rapidly deploy a remote work strategy<\/span><\/a>. Initially, most of those businesses attempted to simply copy and paste their traditional work processes into a virtual environment, with minimal changes\u2014for the sake of simplicity, speed, and adherence to tradition. However, this meant dealing with lag, interruptions, limited body language, and excessive participants in video chats.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, remote meetings tend to allow for a more lax atmosphere, allowing participants to multi-task (or worse, multi-lax) while other participants take the lead and drive the organization forward.<\/p>\n

As more business owners and team leaders are realizing, traditional meetings are borderline untenable in these circumstances, reserved only for very specific types of discussions. And once they realize that meetings can be replaced with better alternatives, there may not be a reason to ever go back\u2014even if they return to the traditional office.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

New Types of Meetings<\/b><\/p>\n

In some ways, meetings are evolving, rather than dying. Increasingly, they\u2019re benefiting from strategies like:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n