Bosses: Enough with making workers commute for excessive meetings.
So says Koen Blanquart, leadership expert and author of flexible work book The Suitcase Office, in a recent interview on Fortune Connect, Fortunes executive leadership community. The worst companies overload on meetings, which he says are not only killers of freedom, but killers of time.
We knew this before the pandemic, though few companies seem to have taken the hint. A September 2022 study from UNC Charlotte found that a full third of meetings are pointless, and letting expensive employees attend them costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue per year.
If you look at why meetings are organized, how theyre organized, and how theyre structuredfirst of all, why are they organized? he said. Most meetings are, true to the cliché, easily replaced by an email. There are dashboards and automated information systems to know if something has happened or not.
In fact, Blanquart added, bringing people together synchronously when its not fully necessary is kind of punishing them. And though eliminating meetings altogether is unlikely to be the answer, holding them just for the sake of holding them is a costly punishment for workers.
People spentI just calculated this morning$16,000 a year to commute, on average, Blanquart said. If thats to go to the office to hear a manager talk about, yes we got our numbers, thanks for being here, have a cup of coffee and sandwich and go home, thats not respecting our employees.
After all, 84% of respondents to a FlexJobs survey said the top benefit of working remotely was eliminating the commute. Thats probably because its become so expensivean annual average of $8,466, 31% more than pre-pandemic. Plus, theyre longer; the Census Bureau finds the average Americans commute has jumped 10% since 2006 for drivers, and has doubled for those taking public transport.
Meetings should go the way of the fax machine
Perhaps the misplaced emphasis on meetings stems from bosses feeling beholden to the pre-pandemic way of work. After all, Blanquart says weve somehow allowed offices to remain firmly stuck in the past. (No wonder nobody wants to go in.)
Were still in that same office where we introduced the typewriter and the rotary telephone; we havent redesigned the concept, Blanquart said. Were still at the office where there should be a fax machine in the corner and a typewriter on the side desk. Weve only slowly evolved into a working environment thats ready for the new way of working and the technological world were in now.
Traditional office spacesalongside other vestiges of the past like the eight-hour workday and the fully in-person workweekare currently frozen in an industrial model, Blanquart said, which he believes has been allowed to live on past its sell-by date. To the dismay of both workers and bosses, everything is based around 38- to 40-hour workweeks, but were not in that society anymore.
Certainly not; just ask knowledge workers. Almost all of them (95%) want schedule flexibility, per a 10,000-person survey from Slacks Future Forum. Some companies, like Salesforce, have taken them up on it.
But many companies are still looking to the past when they should be looking forward. Each person is the best judge of their own productivity and what success looks like to themand that probably doesnt involve commuting for a ton of meetings.
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