Calendar Cleanups

Recently an increasing number of companies have been on a hunt to remove unnecessary meetings from employee calendars. All of this is done to protect the time of employees and improve efficiency of the businesses. The thought being is that some recurring meetings were created, eventually become unnecessary, but never purged.

Personally, I’m all for reducing one’s schedule to as few meetings as possible. However, these company wide calendar wipes are a band aid solution to a bigger company culture problem.

If these meetings are deemed unnecessary after some amount of time, I would question why were they necessary in the first place. Meetings are created to pass information to one or more persons. That information is communicated either one way or back and forth. At some point, the information being communicated becomes redundant or unimportant. At this point there is no loss in removing these meetings and it’s a good thing!

However, the main problem with these calendar wipes is that these meetings will crop up again in a few months time. People will schedule meetings, and at some point those meetings become pointless. The solution here isn’t to just remove meetings only to have them be recreated. The solution is to shift your culture of communication where recurring meetings become unnecessary in the first place.

Creating a culture shift is more easily said than done. As your company grows, it becomes harder to make cultural shifts as the impact becomes greater. So it’s important to cultivate the type of working environment you want early. When new employees join, there will be a foundation of “meeting-adverse” habits already in place. For companies that are already established, it will require a bit more work and time to make that change, and routine calendar purges won’t be enough.