The best gift I can think of giving my co-workers is a meeting cancellation notification. The second best is time back in their busy day. Meetings are necessary, especially with remote colleagues and dispersed collaborative teams. You have to be able to meet and talk and discuss ideas. But you can do so efficiently. More efficiently than most of us do regularly, I think.
Meetings that could have been emails aren’t the issue for the most part. People have gotten pretty good at leveraging asynchronous communication tools to drive much of the underlying decision-making that needs to happen regularly. What we need to get better at is meeting efficiency. And I’m not talking about agendas and participant lists and note-taking. All of those are essential, no matter the length, size, or importance of your meeting. I’m talking about focused efficiency. Taking only as long as is required to make a decision and not a second longer. If you want to frustrate people, allow meetings to go off on tangents, or spend most of the time on small talk, or add in more topics to fill the scheduled time rather than stopping as soon as the meeting objective has been achieved.
I’m renowned for the brevity and conciseness of the meetings I schedule. I’ve actually been thanked many times for not wasting people’s time. I schedule a meeting only when absolutely necessary and keep people in the meeting only as long as is absolutely necessary. Get people together, state the problem for alignment, discuss until consensus has been reached, get the hell out. For the vast majority of meetings, you can achieve that in 15-20 minutes tops.
Want to shoot the breeze? Sure, I’m happy to. Let’s set up some time just for that instead of using the first 10 minutes of a meeting to catch up on how our kids are doing. Remember something else you wanted to discuss with me? No problem. Let’s let everyone else who doesn’t have to sit there and listen to a discussion that doesn’t concern them. Respecting people’s time is the single most empathetic way of showing your co-workers that you care about them and their success that I can think of.
When people are in back-to-back-to-back virtual meetings, it can be utterly exhausting. Giving them back a few minutes here and there to take a breath, check an email, respond to an IM is showing them respect. Refusing to waste someone’s time is more than just a good idea; it’s the law. Or at least it should be.