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Summary.
The authors of this piece have been studying how organizations can make the right things easier and the wrong things harder since 2014. In every workplace they’ve studied, helped, or worked at, they’ve found that meetings create wasteful and soul-crushing friction. To find out how to reduce that friction by “repairing” meetings, they conducted two studies — “Meeting Doomsday” and a “Meeting Reset” — at Asana, a company that builds work-management software. They used what they learned to create a step-by-step guide to help managers identify, eliminate, and repair broken meetings. Here, they discuss five key ingredients for success.Francesca is a community manager on the marketing team at Asana, a company that builds work-management software. Always enthusiastic about trying new ways to make her job easier, she volunteered for the company’s “Meeting Doomsday” pilot study, where she and eight of her fellow marketing colleagues sought to reduce the amount of time they spent in meetings.