Zoom Meetings

We've gone through a different way of working where if you're not careful, you end up with back-to-back Zoom meetings. You have no chance to actually get any work done because all you do is you're jumping from one meeting to another, with barely any time to take a break or walk around. I'm sure many other people have had times where your back's aching because you haven't moved enough and haven't walked around the room. And there are two schools of thought: those who don't really care if they have Zoom meetings all day and then turn off. And then there are those who think, "I need to get that work done." And they'll carry on into the evening just trying to get the work done. We've got to find a balance.

Since March of 2020, when we all switched over to digital, the number of meetings has gone up exponentially, right? Everyone is double or triple booked. Employees are really, really struggling to keep up with not only attending a lot of meetings in the day but also logging in longer hours afterwards to be more productive. Because when they're in the meeting, they can't actually do the work that they're supposed to do. We used to have this to a certain extent when we were physically in offices, but it's suddenly swung the pendulum to the other side entirely because the barrier to entry for setting up a meeting is so low. You just have to click a video conferencing button, and then automatically, you have a session created. You don't have to contend now for conference rooms or transition time.  I recently conducted a survey, across all industry verticals, on meeting overload. This was not just organizations that were in the cloud-native space, but people who had a legacy footprint or who were in warehouses and that had to go to a digital footprint immediately: people in retail, in hospitality, in travel, all the various sectors. I suspected this but what I found was alarming. Over 65% of the respondents reported that they had been spending at least five hours in video conference per day on average. Five hours. And over 82% of the workforce reported that they were double- or triple-booked at least once a week. I think almost a quarter of them said that they experienced this meeting contention at least once a day. With so many hours of work being spent in video conferencing meetings, they were starting to log in more time because all their performance metrics and productivity are measured by their throughput or velocity or the number of widgets they create. So their OKRs and their KPIs did not change, but how they worked fundamentally shifted. Almost 88% of the respondents said that, on average, they were spending at least four additional hours per week to catch up with their deliverables, and I want to say almost 65% of the people spent more than one and a half hours a day. So that's 7.5 hours a week, nearly an additional day of work just to catch up, because of the meetings and the conferences. And if you extrapolate it, that's two-thirds of our workforce worked almost 300 extra hours since the pandemic broke out. During that time, the pay didn't increase, expectations didn't change, but the amount of work people received increased, and stress skyrocketed. One of the easiest ways to reduce the stress and make sure that your people are healthier and have tangible results is tackling this sprawl.