How work feels
Meeting load survey
Before you announce a no-meeting Wednesday, find out how many hours people actually spend in meetings and which ones they would give up.
Opens this survey in Gists as a draft you can edit. Sign in with Slack, Google or your work email. 30 days free. No card needed.
Five questions
Roughly how many hours a week do you spend in meetings?
Pick one
- Under 5
- 5 to 10
- 10 to 15
- 15 to 20
- More than 20
How much of your meeting time feels well spent?
1 = very little, 5 = almost all
Which of these meetings often feel like a poor use of your time?
Pick any, optional
- Status updates
- Recurring team syncs
- Large all-hands
- Planning sessions
- Cross-team check-ins
- One-on-ones
- None of these
Do you feel comfortable declining a meeting where you are not needed?
Yes or no
What would make meetings more useful for you?
Written answer, optional
We wrote these questions for this survey and they are not a validated scale. You can edit them once the survey opens in Gists. If you copy them into another tool, check what it records about who answered.
The decision it helps with
Do you need fewer meetings, or better ones, or neither?
Running it
Once before any reset, and again a month or two after. Question 1 is a self-reported estimate, which is good enough to compare before and after but won't match a calendar export.
What the results might look like
These are made-up examples to show the patterns, not real data.
Lots of hours, most well spent
15 to 20 hours a week, with an average of 4.2 for well spent.
- What it means
- Volume isn't the complaint.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean there is nothing to fix.
- What to do
- Leave them, or look at when in the week they fall.
One kind of meeting is the problem
status updates chosen by 70% on question 3.
- What it means
- That format may have run out of value.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean you can drop it without a replacement.
- What to do
- Swap it for a written update for a month and see what breaks.
People can't decline
55% “No” on question 4.
- What it means
- Declining feels risky.
- What it doesn't mean
- It doesn't mean managers are forbidding it.
- What to do
- Have leaders decline in public and say why.
What to tell people afterwards
Say what you're cancelling or shrinking, and for how long.
What to measure next, and when
Repeat the survey one to two months after the change and compare hours.
Comparing teams
Results show only when 5 or more people answer. A team below 5 rolls up into the team above it. A group is also held back when comparing it with another group could reveal a small team. HR and named leaders see every team with 5 or more answers. Each manager sees only their own team. Employees see no team scores. Themes only by default. Word-for-word answers are a company setting, off unless turned on, and employees see a notice before they write.
How much do meetings cost people?
In a one-week diary study, more meetings went with more daily fatigue and a heavier sense of workload (Luong & Rogelberg, 2005). The study is small, with a sample reported at 37 volunteers, and relies on self-report, so read the hours in question 1 as estimates.
Rogelberg and colleagues found the effect of meeting time on how people felt depended on how interdependent their work was, on meeting quality, and on how strongly they were trying to get things done. Results also varied with the time frame and with how meeting demands were measured (Rogelberg et al., 2006). People whose work relies on others can feel quite differently about the same calendar.
When hours are fine and meetings are still bad
Then it's a quality problem, and the meeting effectiveness survey is the one to send.
Related
Sources
- Luong, A., Rogelberg, S. G. (2005). Meetings and More Meetings: The Relationship Between Meeting Load and the Daily Well-Being of Employees. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 9, 58-67. doi:10.1037/1089-2699.9.1.58
- Rogelberg, S. G., Leach, D. J., Warr, P. B., Burnfield, J. L. (2006). "Not Another Meeting!" Are Meeting Time Demands Related to Employee Well-Being?. Journal of Applied Psychology, 91, 83-96. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.91.1.83