In a time when meetings are becoming more and more frequent, several studies suggest that they are disrupting people’s concentration reducing their productivity. At the time of the COVID-19 health crisis, with several people still working from home, telecommunication meetings are invading the agendas, making it more difficult to plan long tasks. This is the reason why the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) of the University of Luxembourg is embracing the policy of “Meeting-free Wednesdays”.
“Besides the interruptions itself, many of our employees reported to be even more exhausted from WebEx meetings than from face-to-face meeting,” says Anke Vogler, Head of Operations at the LCSB. “Also, it is not only time of the meeting itself that is worth considering. Especially if there is only an hour or so between them and the work such as coding, writing, creating, making experiments requires concentration for several hours, the effort to get back into the topic and focus again is significant.”
While meetings are still necessary to run businesses, a number of companies are embracing the policy of “No Meetings Days” for all their employees. These meeting-free days have proven to increase workers productivity and creativity and it is for this reasons that the LCSB decided to implement “Meeting-free Wednesdays” starting from 8th of July 2020.
“We highly encourage our staff to apply the meeting-free day policy on Wednesdays, it will be easier for everyone if everybody is applying this rule. This new policy is being implemented to give our researchers and administrative staff more time to concentrate on tasks which require focus for several hours”, details Anke Vogler.
While implementing a meeting-free day might be challenging at first, people that already perform no meeting days point out a gain of productivity in the long run. But how to get really productive in a “No Meetings Day”? An article of the Harvard Business Review, gives some tips to get the most out of a meeting-free day e.g. set all your Wednesdays on “busy” in your agenda, set-up physical boundaries if possible, pick your work wisely by working on projects that require focus on high-level thinking and try to ignore routine tasks and emails.
Furthermore, LCSB encourages its staff to reflect on the aim and participant list before each meeting to make the most of each encounter.
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