Less meetings, more productivity

• According to MIT, three days without meetings each week produce a 73% increase in productivity
• Another benefit is the improvement of the mental health of the employees, a consequence of the reduction of stress

The MIT study

A experiment published in the MIT Sloan Management Review, a journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been surprising due to the conclusions it provides, which could be summarized as “many organizations are implementing days without meetings, but finding the optimal weekly balance requires deliberation”.

Even before the pandemic, 71 % of managers thought meetings were costly and unproductive. As many companies have shifted to remote and hybrid work models, meetings have steadily increased in frequency and length to make up for the loss of in-person interactions. This situation negatively affects the psychological, physical and mental well-being of people.

For all these reasons, in corporate environments days without meetings are being adopted, in which employees work at their own pace and collaborate with others at a pace and in a non-forced, non-established schedule.

Evaluation of the effects of days without meetings

Specifically, the study consisted of completely eliminating meetings in 76 companies with more than 1,000 workers, from more than 50 countries, several days a week to see how it affected employee performance. This measure was implemented for twelve months and these are the results:

• Organizations managed to increase their productivity up to 73%.
• Employee stress was reduced by as much as a 57%.
• Employee satisfaction is increased by 65%.

The MIT researchers classified companies into five groups, based on the number of days they would completely eliminate meetings, from one to five.

In addition, the researchers spoke with managers and the human resources director of each company to obtain executive perspectives on the approaches taken; examined data comparing employee stress levels before and after a reduction in meetings; and evaluated the subsequent impact on productivity, collaboration, and engagement.

The conclusion was clear: the greatest benefit was obtained by those companies that suppressed work meetings three days a week. With fewer or more days without meetings, the degree of effectiveness of this measure was lower.

As the authors of the study indicate, the meetings are useful in their fair measure, the excess of them what makes them unproductive. For this reason, they recommend that a clear agenda and specific objectives be established, which will ensure that those responsible have prepared it conscientiously and that attendees have prior material before attending.