It's Tuesday, 12.30. The weekly team meeting is in the diary, as it has been every Tuesday for three years. The agenda looks a lot like last week's. A few people arrive late with sandwiches, the same two people do the talking, and everyone leaves on time with nothing much changed. Nobody would dream of canceling it, though. It's the team meeting.
Somewhere along the way that meeting stopped being a decision and became a habit. That's the real trouble with meetings. They aren't bad things, but plenty of them keep running long after anyone remembers why they started.
The end of the year is a good moment to change that. Before 2027 fills your calendar for you, ask every recurring meeting to earn its slot.
Meetings aren't the enemy. Bad ones are.
It's tempting to think the answer is fewer meetings. The research points to better ones. When Steven Rogelberg, who has studied meetings for decades, surveyed around a thousand employees, how good people felt their meetings were tracked closely with how they felt about their jobs. The number of meetings mattered far less.
So the question isn't how to get rid of meetings, it's how to make each one earn its place. Rogelberg has a simple test: if you can't write down the questions a meeting needs to answer, it doesn't need to happen. "Catch up" isn't a question. "Do we change the surgery schedule in January?" is.
Zombie meetings never die on their own
Meeting software company Teem found the average recurring meeting lasts up to eight sessions before its purpose fades and people start drifting off. The meeting carries on regardless. Teem called them zombie meetings: still on the calendar, still taking up a room, with nothing alive inside.
Shopify dealt with its zombies in one go. In January 2023 it deleted every recurring meeting of three or more people from the calendars of its 10,000 staff, and nothing could come back for two weeks. The company says it got back 322,000 hours. The bigger shift was cultural: people felt free to decline a meeting, even one called by the COO.
You don't need software to do this. Before the new year, list every recurring meeting in your practice and ask three blunt questions of each. What has this decided in the last three months? Who would notice if it stopped? Would we book it today? Anything that fails is canceled for January. If someone misses it, bring it back smaller.
Small practices have a quiet advantage
If you run a two-vet practice and barely hold meetings, you may be doing it right. With three people there are only three one-to-one conversations to keep in step. Your meetings happen at the treatment table, and they work.
The arithmetic turns as you grow. Ten people have 45 possible one-to-one conversations between them, and thirty people have 435. Somewhere around eight vets, the treatment table can't carry it anymore, and across several sites it breaks down completely. That's the point where meetings stop being overhead and become how information travels.
So the right number of meetings depends on your size. A small practice should protect its informality and add structure only where something keeps slipping. A larger hospital or group needs a deliberate rhythm, or the grapevine becomes the communication system.
One US hospital with four owners solved it by meeting in layers. Owners, the practice manager and the associates meet every other week. In the off weeks, the managing owner, practice manager and department heads meet, and each head then briefs their own team. Nobody sits in on everything, and everybody hears what they need.
Give every meeting a job and a shape
Once a meeting has earned its place, give it a shape that fits its job. Here's a rhythm that scales from one site to ten:
Daily huddle, 5 minutes, standing. Who's in, who's out, which patients need extra care and what could trip you up today. A UK GP group with eight sites runs one at 8.15 at every site from a one-page sheet, and 83% of staff said teamwork improved. Standing keeps it short: a classic study found seated meetings ran about a third longer and made no better decisions.
Weekly or fortnightly team meeting, 30 to 45 minutes. Decisions and problems only. Updates go out in writing beforehand. If there's nothing to decide, cancel it that week and say so.
Case debrief or M&M, monthly. M&M stands for morbidity and mortality: a regular, blame-free review of cases where something went wrong or a patient died. Human medicine has used them for around a century, and in the UK they're part of the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme. The format is simple: what happened, what helped, what you'd change. A review of 46 studies found structured debriefs like this lift team performance by about a quarter, in medical and non-medical teams alike. Keep it blame-free or people stop bringing cases.
One-to-ones, at least monthly. Research on manager one-to-ones found quality counts for more than frequency, as long as they happen at least monthly. What made the difference was the manager showing real interest in the person. Let them do the bulk of the talking.
Quarterly progress review. Gallup found only 14% of employees strongly agree their performance reviews inspire them to improve. A short, forward-looking conversation every quarter beats a once-a-year reckoning.
Annual planning day. A UK study of strategy away days found four in ten made no measurable difference. The usual culprits were thin preparation and only the top team in the room. Prepare properly, and bring at least one voice from the front line.
Whoever chairs, the job is the same: start on time, make the decisions, note who does what, and finish early when you can.
Five minutes late costs more than five minutes
One more thing people tend to shrug off. In one experiment, groups were randomly set to start on time, five minutes late or ten minutes late. The late groups came up with fewer and weaker ideas and were less satisfied with the meeting. A separate survey found 37% of meetings start late, and people left waiting felt frustrated and disrespected.
The fix costs nothing. Start at the time on the invite, even if people are missing. Late arrivals soon learn the meeting won't wait for them.
Closing thoughts
Back to that Tuesday meeting. It may well be worth keeping, but give it a clear job, the right people and a fresh agenda each time. If it can't earn that, let it go and see who misses it.
November and December are the natural moment. Run your zombie audit before the holidays, start January with only the meetings that passed, and look again at the end of the first quarter. Some will need to come back. Plenty won't. Then rinse and repeat each year.
One final tip: break the half-hour habit
Calendars default to 30 and 60 minutes, so that's how long nearly every meeting runs. Try 15 and 45 instead, starting at quarter past or quarter to the hour. An odd start time stands out in the diary, and the shorter slot leaves a gap before whatever comes next. Microsoft's research found people in back-to-back meetings grew more stressed with each one, while a ten-minute break between them kept stress level. Outlook can even shorten every meeting for you automatically.
