The pandemic has forced companies to be remote.  We were already seeing more and more companies that are “remote-first” or “remote-only.”  In this environment, teamwork is even more critical, and slipping deadlines hurt the bottom line.  Want to increase revenue and work satisfaction?  Build a culture where people take pride in their calendars.  Skeptical?  Read on!

Firms would see a great return in getting employees to be more responsible with the meetings they accept or reject.  Treat this as only slackers, and unorganized people that can’t manage time, ignore invites.  They are wasting company resources (money!).

Think about it.  The day is an ever-changing list of priorities and goals.  Often progress depends on meeting with several people.  When people schedule meetings and others never accept/reject it blocks time on everyone else’s calendars.  Key people not showing up adds an opportunity cost of:

• The time that the other attendees waited to confirm the meeting wasn’t going to happen.
• That those attendees could have been available for some other meeting.
• Those employees also had to deal with context switching.  Breaking out of what they had been working on and transitioning into the meeting.  This is especially true of developers, copywriters, and the team creating your documentation.  When they get into that “flow” state they are highly productive and create higher-quality work.
• People won’t dive into complex tasks if the next meeting is only 20 or 30 minutes out.  They will just become immersed when they need to drop out of that Flow state.  So when this meeting gets canceled or postponed 15 minutes later, you’ve wasted part of their day.

Examples

If an AE creates a meeting, then has their customer cancel but doesn’t stay on top of it – that SE is not available for other calls.  Granted it does take a day or two to sync on a new time, but I propose the AE immediately update the invite for another time and send it as a proposal.  On a tangent – the AE shouldn’t sound too desperate and falling all over themselves to make any time slot work.  The reality is that your firm’s solution is in demand, and if you don’t take this slot, someone else will.

There always will be emergencies or unexpected items coming up.  Company cultures where meetings are frequently rescheduled last minute create a scenario where lots of meeting slots don’t work for other meetings.

Here is a hypothetical example.  A mandatory meeting with 30 attendees is postponed to a few days later 5 minutes before the start time.  Let’s say your firm still has too many meetings and people often don’t attend.  If even half were planning to show up – those 15 people were not available for other meetings.  Those meetings were often scheduled later in the week – delaying whatever project or task they were related to.

Delaying the team from other meetings adds another unnoticed cost.  Postponing end-of-day meetings break employees out of the “flow” state. After breaking out of that “flow” state, they’ll check their email or calendar and get the word it has been postponed.  Since they are broken out of that enjoyable state, it is hard to try and get back into it.  Especially with only an hour or less left in the day.  They’ll likely blow off the rest of the day.  I know I typically put 30 minutes on my timer when I am trying to get myself over the “hump” and into that fantastic flow state.  It’s broken and often doesn’t go off, but the ticking goes on long enough to get me started.

This blocking of time also leads to fuller calendars.  With people in multiple time zones, the answer is often to schedule meetings during off hours for most.  Be aware of time differences and “always on” culture.

If your leaders frequently have multiple overlapping meetings where none have been accepted or that several have been accepted then you have a serious problem.  At each time slot, there are multiple people that don’t know if all the people they need will be present.

Photo by Windows on Unsplash.  Cropped & rotated by author.