I recently had an organization reach out to me about facilitating some cultural conversations around burn out. This is one of my favorite issues to try to solve—it is tricky, but potentially transformative if there’s a real commitment to change. As I listened, I heard the same story I’ve heard for most of my career, the same one I’m watching unfold for countless friends and peers working in all kinds of organizations in every industry.
People flit from meeting to meeting (or, right now, Zoom to Zoom). Because everyone’s calendar is already so full, new meetings get jammed into all hours. Work happens in the margins, on personal time, whenever it can be fit in. Urgent projects pop up and there’s no where to put them, yet they MUST BE DONE ASAP. Or, everyone’s least favorite joke: they really needed to be done yesterday.
Stress mounts as deadlines become unrealistic, and meanwhile personal health and home life suffer. Eventually people leave, only to go to the next place, which—SURPRISE!—has the exact same problem.
People try things like an established No Meeting Day thinking this might save them. Nope. It fails to address the underlying issues causing the problems, and desperate people start booking meetings on No Meeting Day because: “That’s the only time any one was available!”
Before something like a No Meeting Day can have any impact at all, it’s likely one or more of the following are needed:
- stronger vision and strategic direction from which everything else flows
- better communication from leadership and between teams
- shared process for decision making
- trust and empowerment of individuals or smaller groups to make decisions
- placing high value on employee time and setting expectations accordingly.
If you aren’t serious about solving for those things, then, well, you’re probably going to stay in crisis mode and burn out employees, and the wheel keeps on churning. Only after those essential priorities are met will things like a No Meeting Day or improving meeting practices have much effect.
Then you can dig into more granular things like:
- understanding what constitutes a meeting vs. an email, a memo, a project request, etc.
- understanding who needs to be present
- understanding how long is really needed
- and the list goes on… (see Stopping the Meeting Madness for more)
[Featured image: a team at Butler University working with YAY to design better meetings.]