The types of meetings that lead to employee burnout and high turnover
How work meetings can harm a person’s wellbeing
- Meetings at work can significantly impact employee wellbeing, potentially leading to burnout or increased engagement depending on their design and execution.
- Research indicates that the problem with meetings often lies in their poor design, lack of clear purpose, and the inequalities they can inadvertently reinforce, rather than simply their frequency.
- The shift to virtual meetings, accelerated by the pandemic, has introduced new challenges like cognitive overload and hyperconnection, and has been shown to exacerbate gender inequalities, with women reporting more difficulty speaking up online.
- Instead of eliminating meetings, the solution proposed is to improve their quality by first questioning their purpose and then selecting the appropriate modality (audio, video, in-person) based on the meeting's specific objectives.
- Effective meeting design, which includes clear objectives and appropriate modalities, can transform them into spaces for co-construction, respect, and collective innovation, reflecting a more inclusive organisational culture.