How Sound Could Drive Better (And Fewer) Meetings

Considering how much of an organization’s working hours are dictated by meetings, it’s difficult to admit we put near-zero effort into synthesizing or quantifying the interactions those meetings contain.

Meeting productivity, or lack thereof, is a $400 billion-dollar problem by some measures, and that might even be a conservative estimate.

Think about how many meetings you’ve been to this month that could have been an email update. Instead of taking 30 minutes out of your day, you could have found the answers on your own if your organization had a connected work hub that promoted asynchronous work.

But this isn’t the norm yet, and in a theoretical sense — most of our meetings happen because we don’t already have the answers. Ergo, the holy grail of meetings is not to need them at all.

This got me thinking about the makeup of meetings. What do we actually talk about, and how can this be analyzed to prove or disprove a meeting’s efficiency? As we see more knowledge workers increasingly move to a hybrid or remote model — we might just be able to answer those questions.

To understand a little bit more about the productivity of meetings, I spoke with Rich Maloof — Director of Programming for a political non-profit. Unlike many of us who are asked to navigate the world of virtual meetings day-in and day-out, Maloof has a background in audio engineering, which has proven critical for analyzing the patterns of his calls.