Not everyone got it, at first: as the management professor Vijay Pereira spoke to companies about trialling meeting-free days, managers at one multinational did what managers do: they called a meeting. Then another. Then another, and another, and another, and… “They actually had 17 recorded meetings, at an average of two hours… 34 hours of their lives, they spent to decide whether they were to opt in!”
Eventually – perhaps the people opposing the motion just died? – the company decided to opt in to two days per week in which no one in the company would have any meetings at all. And like most of the 76 multinational companies in Pereira’s two-year experiment, they found that it worked. They didn’t need to have as many meetings. Most companies, on most days, didn’t need to have meetings at all.
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