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How to Boost Productivity at Work by 73 Percent: Ban Meetings 3 Days a Week
Very few things flourished during Covid. Meetings are the exception. Both personal experience and various surveys show that time spent in meetings has skyrocketed since knowledge workers left offices en masse two plus years ago.
While dueling experts have debated if the shift to working from home has been a net gain or loss for productivity overall, one thing is clear: All those meetings are exhausting. Nobody (OK, almost nobody) likes staring at themselves in a small box for hours on end, while the constant interruption of normal working hours can drive employees to work late or early to find some peace, courting burnout.
One obvious solution, increasingly popular with big companies like Meta (formerly known as Facebook), is simply banning meetings one or more days a week. It’s a common sense intervention productivity experts have pushed since well before the pandemic, but how much of an impact can it really have on employees’ output and well being?
The short answer, according to a new study highlighted in the MIT Sloan Management Review, is a huge impact. Enough that, if you haven’t already implemented a no-meeting day (or two or three) a week, you should seriously consider giving the policy a try.
