MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Declare ‘Calendar Bankruptcy' to Move Beyond Meeting-Driven Culture

It’s a ubiquitous complaint in corporate culture: Practically everyone is overwhelmed by meetings. And there are real questions about whether meetings are necessary to get things done, or if they are getting in our way far too often. In a survey of managers across a wide range of industries, researchers Leslie Perlow, Constance Hadley, and Eunice Eun found that more than 70% of people believed meetings were unproductive and inefficient, and 65% said meetings keep them from completing their work.1

It’s time to rethink the meeting. At Slack, our executives led by example on this by declaring “calendar bankruptcy.” They removed all recurring meetings and one-on-ones from their calendars so that they could consider each one and add back only what was truly necessary. In a message sent out to the entire company, the purpose was explained this way:

• “We’re in a new distributed world and gotta change the way we work.”
• “There are lots of legacy meetings that have changed owner, purpose, scope — let’s start with a blank slate to determine what’s really important.”

About the Author

Brian Elliott, Sheela Subramanian, and Helen Kupp are executive leaders at Future Forum, a consortium founded by Slack, and the coauthors of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives (Wiley, 2022).

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