Are conference calls lowering our productivity?

COVID19 brought us work from home as a norm. Not having to commute and get ready for work boosted productivity¹ that is slowly getting countermanded by conference calls. What started as an amazing tool for engagement and collaboration now threatens to become an impairment for both organizations and individuals.

According to one of the recent researches, there are over billion meetings a year in the United States alone. This equates to circa 15% of worktime, with surveys showing that 71% of those are considered unproductive by the very participants. Further on, the research estimates that the annual price of these unproductive meetings is astonishing $37 billions.

These numbers are getting even higher in a post-COVID19 world: 54% of office employees claim that they are attending more meetings now, online, than they were before the pandemic. More meetings, less time to do the work, longer hours. More meetings, less work being done, lower productivity, relatively higher costs. More virtual meetings — more distractions to overcome and keep employees focused and engaged.

Source: Zippia research 2022

There are (at least) two dimensions of this paradox: employee’s and organizational. Whilst the former has the ability to directly impact the number of conference calls on their agendas, the latter can influence their efficiency and effectiveness from a structural (process-wise) angle. This article is the first out of two analyzing this topic and focuses on the individual employee’s perspective. How can you as an employee improve productivity by reducing time spent on conference calls?

How to increase productivity by reducing time spent on virtual calls?

It is a given — we cannot control who invites us to a call when, but we can still decide whether to join or not; after all, we do own our time and responsibility over doing our jobs. Admittedly, declining to participate may not always be possible but it is about progress, not perfection and every “saved” and productively redeployed minute counts. This is especially true for those higher up in the hierarchy since most of their agenda is already overwhelmed with virtual meetings².

The right way to manage time vis-à-vis conference calls is a five-step process:

1. Establish baseline

2. Categorize

3. Evaluate impact

4. Micromanage

5. Communicate.

There is the optional sixth step too — making good use of the newly-found time.

Establish baseline

The first step is to analyze the calendar over the past four weeks and identify the average time spent on conference calls each week. This will be the baseline to measure time savings. If you are lucky enough so that 80% of your calendar is free for undistracted work, settling with the status quo may not be a bad idea. However, if you spend more then 20% of worktime attending calls, your goal should be to reduce that number initially by 10% and monitor situation for at least two months. Once the new baseline is established, you can go into another iteration, aiming once again for marginal improvement.

Categorize

With the target number in mind, you can now move on to analyse the structure of your upcoming week/month and types (categories) of meetings you need to attend. The best way to group calls is according to the criteria of cadence and ownership:

• Is the call recurrent, urgent or other?

• Who organized it, one of the direct superiors, yourself or someone else.

This means listing all of the meetings and assigning each against the above categories for both criteria. In this way it will become easier to simply filter sum of time spent on recurrent, urgent or other calls, where you may be the organizer, attendee or invited by your manager(s). Understanding the structure will help you deploy the right strategy to remove those deemed unproductive from your agenda.

Evaluate impact

Once you have the list, it is all about prioritizing where to start. The easiest way to do so is by following three simple steps:

1. Take out of the equation urgent calls — you will most probably need to attend those (this includes all ad-hoc meetings that arrive promptly)

2. Take out calls organized by your direct superiors — although eventually you may need to decline some of these, I would suggest to begin clearing out other categories first

3. Place all of the remaining calls into one of the quads:

Start next phase of the process with whichever quad has the highest sum of time.

Micromanage

Once identified where the bulk of your time goes, it is necessary to go into detail and try to understand purpose of each conference call within the given quad. To do so, ask yourself the key question:

Is this call for my information, action or input?

The answer will decide call’s fate in your calendar:

The above also applies if you are the organizer. However, as the organizer you have more power to control the meeting so instead of deleting the call, consider other options — can you reduce frequency, number of participants, duration? Perhaps you can suggest the same to the organizers of calls where you are the attendee.

Communicate

The most uncomfortable part of the process is sending the “decline” answer. This is especially true for those who are well-known to always say “yes” to every task (you can read more about overachievers here). Luckily, there are elegant ways to communicate rejection without sounding rude, arrogant or disengaged.

For example, simple comments like “I am not sure I can bring much value on this”, “can we catch up after?” or “can I help in some way before?” can go a long way and often you will have the very organizer retracting their invitation. Also, if it is a particularly busy week and you want to join as a support, ask to postpone to a week where you have more time on your agenda. Or, just call the organizer and share honestly your feedback relative to your participation. Often people get invited because the organizer is not certain who is the most relevant person to attend so do not shy away from helping them by pointing to the right direction.

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Although it may seem that this process takes time to be done weekly, actually it does not. Doing it once will raise the awareness on the types of calls we attend as those tend to repeat weekly. Doing it for the second time will show you that you can take control over your time and empower you to work smarter instead of harder. You probably won’t need the third time as you will be applying the process in real time as invites are coming in.

Congratulations on making more time for yourself. Where will you invest it?

¹ A two-year study by Great Place to Work® of more than 800,000 employees at Fortune 500 companies found that most people reported stable or even increased productivity levels after employees started working from home.

Another study from Stanford University found that working from home increases productivity by 13%. This increase in performance was due to a quieter, more convenient working environment and fewer breaks and sick days.

² HBR study found that executives spend over 50% of their time attending meetings whereas this number goes to 72% for CEOs.