The pain of saving endless labor

We are in the era of endless recording. Meetings became shorter during the pandemic, researchers said, with one article finding that the average length fell 20% in the spring of 2020.

But the meetings are increasing. There is the 25 minute customer contact base, general life catch-up with your manager, performance feedback session, meeting to prepare for the meeting.

“It never ends,” says Fernandez.

We were already on the right track to deal with burnout before the pandemic. The shift from hierarchical organizations to matrix and delaminated organizations means more bosses and teams to coordinate with. Increasingly global affairs mean invitations to times when we would normally be in bed. Caroline Kim Oh, a leadership coach based near New York City, says that in recent years, many of her clients have started to feel that meetings are just something happening to them.

“You have no control over your workday,” she says. “They just appeared.”

Working from home and going through a crisis seems to have made the situation worse. In an April survey by the meeting planner Doodle, 69% of 1,000 full-time remote workers said their meetings had increased since the start of the pandemic, with 56% saying their crowded schedules were hurting their performance at work.

Constant check-ins have become some bosses’ version of micromanaging, a way to keep tabs on workers they don’t trust. The coordination that used to be done by rotating your chair or crossing the hallway now requires additional formalities and time for everyone still spread out in home offices. Plus, there’s a sense that empathetic leaders should stay in touch during times of transition, whether that’s when the world came to a halt last year or when we return to headquarters now.

The message to managers is often, “Hey, check with your employees. See if they’re okay. Care more ”, explains Ms. Kim Oh, executive coach. Sometimes caring more means saving a worker from another Zoom, she adds.

What happens next? If we all go back to work five days a week, we could get back to those effective in-person recordings, says Raffaella Sadun, a professor at Harvard Business School who has studied many meetings before and during the pandemic. But organizations testing a hybrid setup should be prepared for a mess.

There are now two types of interactions to deal with, says Dr. Sadun. “One is at the water cooler, the other is on Zoom.” If you are making a decision with the coworker who is sitting at a desk, you should always call the teammate who spends Tuesdays at home to make sure she is on board. Suddenly, all Zooming all the time doesn’t seem so bad.

Still, many employees are optimistic that things will improve. In the Doodle survey, 70% of people said they expected to have fewer meetings when they returned to the office. Angela Nguyen, a freelance health care consultant in Boston, predicts workers will return to the good old days of back-to-back meetings, as opposed to the double and triple booked schedules she sees now.

“It’s not sustainable,” she says. She has seen clients attempting to divide and conquer, jumping for 15-minute cameos or sending various team members to different video calls. Then they sync afterwards — with another meeting.

Are we all used to having our business contacts just a click away for all those months, with no travel time or personal projects as a natural frontier? Does loneliness play a role?

“I wonder if people just want to connect, just chat, because they don’t have an office to go to,” Ms. Nguyen says.

Overall, employees put in an extra five to eight hours of work per week during the pandemic, says Rob Cross, professor of global leadership at Babson College and author of the forthcoming book, “Beyond Collaboration Overload.” More meetings means more chores to catch up on at the end of the day, when we finally have a minute to peek through our balloon to-do lists. Plus, switching between longer and shorter meetings is extremely taxing on our brains.

“They’ve created work that they don’t see,” Dr. Cross says of organizations. “It’s crushing people.”

Becca Apfelstadt’s team from marketing agency Treetree returned to their Columbus, Ohio office last month, two half days a week. The CEO’s verdict on the meetings is this: They’re not worse than before. At the start of the pandemic, workers complained that they did not have time to take water or go to the toilet. “It was like we weren’t surviving if we couldn’t figure this out,” she says.

The company moved some communications to messaging services like Slack, reduced meetings to 20 or 50 minutes, and encouraged walk-and-talk style conversations, using AI services to take notes.

The efforts have helped, says Ms Apfelstadt, and so far the switch to the hybrid has not created a headlong rush. Yet there were hiccups. The other week, she spotted three employees huddled together on a couch, trying to share a laptop camera for a video conference.

“They just had a little person in the middle, and she got run over every time someone tried to make a point,” Ms Apfelstadt said. She recommends that companies keep the formal meeting schedule light during the transition and lean into casual conversations around the office.

Yet not everyone wants it. Seanna Thompson, physician and administrator of the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, has loved her remote meetings for the past year and more. Terror comes when she thinks of returning to those ad hoc, winding recordings by the water fountain.

“I’m like, oh my gosh, that just derailed my whole day,” she says. “I don’t think what we were doing before was that effective.

Write to Rachel Feintzeig at [email protected]