Study: Eliminating Meetings Can Increase Productivity and Reduce Meeting Fatigue

For a large amount of the U.S. workforce, they’ve spent the last three years in endless virtual meetings with colleagues, customers and clients. With the pandemic no longer a driving force behind workplace trends and hybrid work expected to remain a key part of corporate culture, calls on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or other conferencing apps aren’t going anywhere.

However, these never-ending virtual meetings are burning workers out and leading to productivity issues. That’s why TechSmith Corp. sought out to eliminate all meetings for an entire month and instead embrace asynchronous meetings and communication.

The East Lansing, Mich.-based tech firm that offers screen capture and productivity solutions conducted the experiment in July 2022 to see if eliminating meetings would have a positive impact on employee satisfaction, attitude, productive and innovation by offering more flexibility.

The company instead allowed workers to work on their own schedules to complete tasks and projects, and the results suggest that meetings were hampering the company.

TechSmith Corp. found that more than 15% of employees felt more productive, and led to an 8% increase in perceived importance of meetings. According to the company, employees were asked to review all meetings on their calendar and rate each on a scale of one to five, with five being more important. The average score before the meeting-less month was 3.32, but that increased to 3.57 at the end of the experiment.

“As a 30-year leader in productivity and workplace communication solutions, we feel it is our responsibility to push the envelope and seek new ways for workers to efficiently and effectively connect and collaborate with each other,” says Wendy Hamilton, CEO at TechSmith, in a statement. “Technology is obviously crucial for companies to function in a hybrid or remote setting, but real change must begin with a cultural reboot to help employees form new habits and workflows that are more conducive to their changing environment. This experiment was a great step towards building our ideal hybrid work culture.”

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