Solving the Problem of Meeting Overload

Alexander Caillet, Janice Caillet and Leal Good
6 October 2026

An organisation is only as strong as its teams. Why? Because in today’s world, teams are where strategy becomes execution. They are the vehicles through which problems get solved, decisions get made, and results get delivered. In most organisations today, teamwork is not a side issue; it is the operating system.

Because teams play such a crucial role in organisational success, it’s imperative that leaders guide their teams well. This isn’t easy. Today’s teams are being asked to perform through increasingly complex networks and technologies. They must move faster, adapt continuously, coordinate across more boundaries, and deliver with less slack.

The Pressure on Teams Is Mounting

Two major forces are driving the pressure on teams.

First, the business environment is getting harder to navigate. Volatility, uncertainty, rising costs, shifting markets, and global competition are forcing organisations to shift priorities, tighten margins, adjust budgets, and restructure functions and roles. Every organisational change lands somewhere, and usually it lands on teams. When priorities change, teams must reconfigure how they operate: renegotiating priorities, replanning work, revising earlier decisions, and bringing new members up to speed.

Second, the rapid adoption of AI is accelerating how work is designed, distributed, and executed. When people can produce more, faster, expectations rise. Teams face more output, more iterations, more decisions, and more communication to manage. The result is an emerging AI productivity paradox: organisations are gaining productivity from technology while many teams are experiencing greater workloads, fragmented attention, and mounting pressure.

Meeting Overload: An Ineffective Response

Under pressure, teams often respond in ineffective ways. One clear example is the proliferation of meetings, especially low-value meetings. Low-value meeting overload is often less a calendar problem than a team effectiveness problem.

Faced with incomplete discussions or unsolved problems, a team may delay action and schedule another meeting. When priorities are unclear, decision rights are fuzzy, information flow is poor, or accountability is weak, teams often compensate by scheduling meetings. Frictionless digital scheduling has only accelerated this trend.

The result is predictable: calendars fill, attention fragments, and too much time is spent in status updates and unstructured discussions rather than doing the work teams are uniquely suited to do: generate ideas, solve problems, resolve trade-offs, build alignment, and make decisions. When these outcomes are deferred, progress slows, more meetings get added, deadlines slip, and work spills into non-work hours.

The Proliferation of Low-Value Meetings: A Case Study

A case study from our work with teams demonstrates the valuable difference strong team leadership can make.

The U.S. affiliate of a $1 billion global non-profit organisation working to alleviate poverty and advance social justice had a growing problem across the organisation: meetings were taking over the workday.

The signs were everywhere. Meetings consumed 50% to 70% of many members’ calendars. Non-recurring and one-time meetings were routinely scheduled without consulting participants. The purpose of most meetings was not clear and agendas were absent. In many cases the only information offered was just a meeting title and list of attendees.

As one team member said, “On Friday I might look at my upcoming week and see some space to get real work done, but by Monday meetings will populate half my calendar.”

Most meetings were built around one of two patterns: 1) a round-robin of status updates; or 2) a presentation followed by open-ended discussions. Because these discussions were unstructured, the same voices tended to dominate. Monologues, interruptions, and tangents were common. People checked out and multitasked. For many, non-participation and disengagement became the norm.

Few meetings ended with problems solved, alignment reached, or decisions made. Instead, they often ended with unclear outcomes or next steps, and the scheduling of additional meetings to continue the discussion. As calendars filled, focused work was pushed into evenings and weekends.

The problem was real and frustration was mounting.

The Value of Strong Team Leadership

We worked with the chief program officer to overhaul the team meeting operating model in her division.

First, we coached her to remind her teams that meetings carry a financial cost. When you multiply the number of people in a meeting by their hourly rate, and consider the opportunity cost of their time, you begin to appreciate why effective meetings are essential to organisational health.

Next, we asked her to instruct her teams to stop treating meetings as default communication channels and start treating them as working sessions. Meeting time would be reserved for work that genuinely benefited from teams being together: generating ideas, solving problems, resolving trade-offs, building alignment, and making decisions. Anything that did not require people working together, for example, status updates and routine information sharing, would be communicated outside of meetings as much as possible.

We also coached her to introduce five simple disciplines:

Set an Agenda: Every meeting invitation had to include a clear agenda. Without one, participants had permission to decline.

Define Outcomes: Teams were trained to define the outcomes of a meeting before scheduling it and design conversations that would achieve those outcomes. As much as possible, these outcomes were to focus on generating ideas, solving problems, resolving trade-offs, building alignment, and making decisions.

Right-Size the Meeting: Teams were asked to invite only members who were necessary to achieve the outcomes and to define the time needed to complete the meeting, not default to the one-hour Outlook setting.

Facilitate Discussions: Teams were trained to apply real facilitation skills so that engagement was optimised, participation was balanced, disagreements were resolved, and the original outcomes could be achieved.

Question the Need: Finally, teams were advised to continuously question whether any meeting was necessary at all, especially those where the only outcome was information sharing.

Within three to four months, the changes were producing measurable results.

Teams reported significantly higher engagement and satisfaction with meetings, while most people experienced a 20% to 25% reduction in the number of meetings they attended each week. Just as importantly, meeting time began producing more of what teams actually needed: clearer decisions, stronger alignment, faster problem solving, and more protected time for focused work.

Strong Team Leaders Build Strong Organisations

Team effectiveness can no longer be assumed to emerge simply because capable people have been assembled around a common task. It has to be designed, practiced, and continually renewed.

In an environment where execution increasingly depends on teams, organisations that equip team leaders to build team effectiveness will be better prepared to adapt, move quickly, and turn strategy into results.