- HR Brain Pickings
- Posts
- 🗓️ Your team doesn’t need another meeting
🗓️ Your team doesn’t need another meeting
...it needs time to think and actually work
Hey HR folks!👋
Hope your coffee showed up stronger than your meeting agenda today ☕️
Today we’re talking about something we all feel but don’t always call out: work meetings. Not the useful ones, the endless, recurring, “why am I here” ones that somehow just keep… multiplying.
The numbers are… not great. People are spending around 31 hours a month in meetings that go nowhere, focus time is down to a sad 2–3 hours a day, and most of these meetings aren’t even doing what they’re supposed to.
But calendars continue to stay packed.
Today’s edition is presented by SelectSoftware Reviews
Looking for a simpler way to navigate HR software solutions? SSR’s HR software advisors have helped HR leaders do exactly that. Here’s one example 👇
👇️ Coming up
In today’s edition
🧑💼 Are your employees working, or just meeting all day?
🛋️ The Break Room: What's your organization actually doing about meeting overload right now?
📰 Human Readsources: Starbucks rolls out a new barista bonus program, a look inside Meta's executive pay packages, and a Popeyes fingerprint lawsuit gets dismissed.
💭 Opening thoughts
🧑💼 Are your employees working, or just meeting all day?
.. said no one EVER!
Employees spend an average of 31 hours per month in unproductive meetings, that's nearly four full workdays lost to conversations that often could have been an email.
For organizations, this is more than just a time management inconvenience. It's a strategic liability that erodes productivity, stalls decision-making, and chips away at employee engagement at scale.
HR is uniquely positioned to address this, not just by cutting calendar clutter, but by improving the cultural norms and policies that determine how, when, and why teams gather in the first place.
For easy reading
🧠 Let’s unpick
We've all sat through a meeting that could've been an email. Or a Slack message. Or honestly, nothing at all. But what if it's not just the occasional pointless standup draining your team? What if meetings have become one of the biggest productivity killers in your organization?
The data says yes, and it's kind of alarming. 📊
If you're in HR right now, you're probably fielding two very different complaints simultaneously.
➡️ Leaders want more collaboration, more alignment, more face time.
➡️ Employees want their time back, their mornings protected, and their Wednesdays free from back-to-back calls that leave them scrambling to do their actual jobs after hours.
And the thing is, both sides are right.
🔵 Meetings have doubled per person and increased sixfold per organization, and the average worker is now attending roughly 25 meetings a month, 70% of which are recurring.
🔵 Focus time has collapsed to just 2-3 hours per day for most workers, and half of all meetings are happening during peak cognitive performance windows: the 9-11 am and 1-3 pm slots when people do their best thinking.
🔵 Meanwhile, meetings after 8 pm are up 16% year over year, and nearly 30% of workers are checking email by 10 pm. The workday is bleeding into every corner of people's lives.
🔵 If you think hybrid work is the answer? Think again. Hybrid workers achieve only 31% focus time compared to 45% for office workers, making them the most productivity-challenged group despite being the most common workstyle right now.
🔵 Oh, and 72% of meetings are considered ineffective, yet they keep multiplying.
This is a a retention and burnout story in disguise. 🥸
When focus time disappears, when evenings and weekends get colonized by catch-up work, and when people feel like they're always busy but never actually getting anywhere, that's when disengagement sets in before it shows up in your attrition numbers.
You can read more at...
🎬 Lights, camera, action!
Takeaway (and try this 👇)
🗓️ Start a meeting audit with recurring calendar items that have no clear owner, no agenda, and no decision to make - those are the low-hanging fruit, and cancelling even a handful can give your team back hours every week.
🛡️ Work with leadership to establish protected focus windows (like no meetings before 10 am or on Friday afternoons) and position it as a company-wide norm.
📊 Make the burnout math visible to your managers by sharing the data directly, when they can see that hybrid workers hit only 31% focus time and that output flatlines past 55 hours a week.
🤖 If your organization has AI tools that people downloaded and mostly forgot about, that's a change management problem HR can actually solve, teams using AI effectively report 23% less unproductive work, so closing the gap between "we have the tool" and "we actually use it" is worth prioritizing now.
📣 Give employees both the language and the cultural permission to push back on unnecessary meetings. A simple meeting checklist or a clear norm around what qualifies as "meeting-worthy" can make it feel safe to say no.
👀 Too long didn’t read
TLDR
Meetings have doubled, focus time has collapsed to 2-3 hours a day, and 72% of meetings are considered ineffective, yet somehow the calendar keeps filling up. HR, this is our problem to solve. 🗓️
☕The break room
What’s your take?
In this session, we’ll unpack the signals that it’s time to evolve your HR operating model, how to assess whether staying with a PEO still makes financial and strategic sense, and what it really takes to build internal systems that scale.
🪴 Join live to win one of two desk plants to make your workspace a little bit brighter!
📚 Additional reading
Human Readsources
☕ Starbucks Offers Baristas Up To $1,200 Annual Bonus (The HR Digest) - Starbucks offers baristas up to $1,200 yearly performance-based bonuses.
🚀 Meta Offers Executives $1B Stock For $9T Valuation (HR Brew) - Meta offers executives $1B stock packages tied to $9T valuation.
👆 Illinois Court Dismisses Popeyes Fingerprint Privacy Lawsuit (HR Dive) - Court dismisses Popeyes BIPA fingerprint lawsuit over franchise control.
That’s it for today.
Thanks for reading to the end and we hope today’s edition sparked some new ideas for your workplace! 🧠
We know you’re super busy and really appreciate you saving some room for us in your inbox 😀
On a scale of 1 to HR, how much do you like this edition? |
Reply