It’s easy to default to meetings out of habit. Every day, an estimated 56 million meetings are held throughout the U.S. Most of these meetings are unproductive, with 65% of attendees feeling like they’re wasting their time. While some tasks require face-to-face or screen-to-screen collaboration, some are better handled without a meeting at all.

Jaime Netzer contributed a piece to the Atlassian blog that sheds some light on specific work tasks that are best accomplished asynchronously — and when you might want to send out that meeting invite after all. We share her perspective in this issue of PromoPro Daily.

  1. Ideation and brainstorming. You don’t necessarily need to get your team together to brainstorm. In fact, Netzer says asynchronous brainstorming can be more effective and equitable. It allows everyone to work at their own pace and can help fuel creativity. You also might get more ideas from the quieter voices on your team.

  2. Work planning. After brainstorming all those ideas, you need to figure out how to bring them to life. According to Netzer, there’s often no need to plan work in a room all together when there are so many collaboration tools available. These kinds of work and project management tools are designed to help teams collaborate.

  3. Status meetings. Netzer believes that status meetings should never be meetings at all. The purpose is alignment, and that doesn’t require back-and-forth or collaboration. It simply requires stakeholders to be informed. She suggests keeping everyone on the same page in whatever way works for you, but you probably don’t need scheduled meetings for status updates.

When should you hold a meeting? According to Netzer, go ahead and book a meeting when you want intentional togetherness. You can bond and build trust asynchronously, but intentional togetherness allows your team to come together and get to know each other outside the digital “walls” of the workplace. If you have the time and budget, try to nurture those team connections in person. 

Connection and collaboration don’t always require a meeting. People have enough on their plates as it is and constantly pulling them into live discussions for things like brainstorming, planning or sharing status updates can slow everyone down. If you can take those tasks off the calendar, you give everyone more breathing room and time to focus on what really matters.

Compiled by Audrey Sellers
Source: Jaime Netzer contributes to the Atlassian blog.