Have you ever attended a god-awful meeting that made you want to slam your laptop shut and climb into bed for the rest of the day? If so, you might have been experiencing a “meeting hangover.”
“A meeting hangover is the idea that when we have a bad meeting, we just don’t leave it at the door. It sticks with us and it negatively affects our productivity,” Steven Rogelberg, a professor at UNC Charlotte and author of “The Surprising Science of Meetings,” told CBS News.
According to a survey published by Harvard Business Review, over 90% of respondents said they’ve experienced meeting hangovers, while 47% said they felt less engaged with their work because of said meetings.
The survey also found that the root causes of the meeting-related frustrations included:
- Irrelevance of the topics discussed (59%)
- Lack of a clear agenda or objectives (59%)
- Poor time management (53%)
- Lack of actionable outcomes or follow-up (48%)
- Unequal (39%) or low (38%) participation
- Ineffective facilitation (30%)
Some meetings are necessary in the business world, but there are ways you can ensure a more productive experience.
Rogelberg shared some tips for hosting better meetings and avoiding meeting hangovers. First, he advised keeping the attendee list small. To determine who, exactly, should be included in the meeting, you can organize items as questions, Rogelberg recommended.
That way, “you have a better sense of who really has to be invited to the meeting,” he said.
Additionally, “You know when to end the meeting and if the meeting has been successful—the questions have been answered,” he continued. Perhaps the most important takeaway from this approach is that “if you just can’t think of any questions, it likely means you don’t need to create a meeting.”
In other words, it could easily just be an email—so don’t waste your employees’ precious time and energy, derailing them from their current projects.
And if you’re the employee who’s facing meeting “hangovers,” talk with your coworkers about possible solutions to the issue, trying your best to remain engaged.
“Chatting with your colleague about how to deal with the situation for the future, getting their thoughts, engaging in sense-making where you’re trying to understand, taking different perspectives on what just happened—those types of conversations increase your skills and your resilience when you do have a bad meeting,” Rogelberg said.
The post Always Burnt Out at Work? You Might Be Having Meeting Hangovers. appeared first on VICE.
