Why Your Weekly Team Meeting Should Have Been an Email

Somewhere in your company right now, a meeting is happening. A meeting that could have been an email, at worst, a one- or two-page document.

This meeting neither has an agenda nor a decision to make. It usually has about nine attendees, and three of the nine haven't spoken since the second week this meeting was scheduled.

Two other attendees are obviously attending to work or emails during the meeting, and one has had their camera off and hasn't been responsive for the last 15 minutes.

No one can place who originally called or set up this meeting, or why it's still on the calendar. But every seven days, without fail, it appears on the calendar. Invite. Accept. Attend. Repeat.

It is a fascinating specimen with no natural predators and has been reproducing since 2022, no results, just taking up space.

And you, yes, you are the one who scheduled it.

You Are Not Alone. You Are, However, Responsible.

The Kind of Meeting that should have been an Email

Just in case you are a little confused, let's be precise about the kind of meeting being discussed.

It's not a difficult conversation that needs to happen in real time, nor is it a strategic round call where a decision has to be made quickly. It's not a client call, a board update or a brainstorming session that needs live energy.

We're talking about that weekly sync meeting.

The automated recurring check-in.

The stand-up call exists because once upon a time, it seemed like a brilliant idea to gather everyone together and cancelling it now would require an uncomfortable conversation, one that would be harder than just keeping up with the meeting.

This is the meeting that should have been an email.

Atlassian surveyed 5,000 knowledge workers across 4 continents, and here's what they found: 63% of meetings have no set agenda. 

Furthermore, in 72% of meetings, the stated goals are never actually accomplished. And 73% of the people inside those meetings are doing other work while they sit there, which is, if you think about it, their polite way of telling you exactly what they think of the invitation.

They know.

They have always known that the meeting was absolutely unnecessary and unproductive.

But they are simply too professional to say it directly.

What Recurring Meeting Actually Costs Your Company

Just before discussing who is scheduling these meetings and why, you need to calculate what this habit costs because most founders and executives don't give it the specificity it deserves.

Every week, you have a one-hour team meeting with eight people in attendance. Those eight people aren't building, selling, writing, designing or deciding anything during the meeting.

After tracking a single weekly meeting at a large company, Harvard Business Review found something shocking. That one recurring meeting that seemed ordinary consumed 300,000 person-hours over the course of a year. The equivalent of 150 people working full-time for twelve months.

On just one recurring meeting.

51% of employees have to work at least a few days a week overtime to catch up on work they could not complete because meetings consumed their day. For those at director level and above, that number rises to 67%.

So your team might not be behind because they lack discipline.

They just might be behind because you keep scheduling the Monday morning sync.

The Person Who Schedules Everything

You know this person. You may, under certain circumstances, even be this person.

They schedule a meeting to discuss a brief before the brief is written, schedule another meeting to have a discussion on the outcome of the last meeting, and schedule another meeting to confirm if everyone received the email they sent, because it is important that everyone is on the same page.

Harvard Business Review found something illuminating here: New managers hold almost a third (29%) more meetings than their seasoned counterparts. because somehow, meetings are now proof of engagement. A full calendar, in the logic of the newly promoted, is evidence that you take the role seriously.

The meetings are no longer communication tools; they are credibility tools.

And this is why they are so difficult to stop. Because the person scheduling them is not doing it to waste your time. They are doing it because, at some level, the meetings are working, just not for the reasons they think. 

They are working as a performance of leadership and a ritual of relevance. As the answer to the quiet anxiety that asks: “if I am not in rooms, am I still in charge?”

The answer, for what it is worth, is yes.

You are still in charge. So an email is not a bad choice.

Why Founders Keep the Meetings That should have been an email

Speaking of founders

They are, by most reasonable measures, intelligent and decisive people. They move quickly, think clearly, and have strong opinions about how time should be spent in theory.

But in practice, the founder has a recurring stand-up meeting that is held every Monday morning; it's tagged “weekly alignment” and has been on the calendar since the company had eleven people who worked from 5 different continents.

Two years later, the company now has sixty people and doesn't need it, but the founder still hasn't taken it out because for that to happen, it would require acknowledging that it no longer works, and that feels more uncomfortable than deciding that spending an hour every Monday morning for the past two years is no longer productive.

So the meeting continues.

And the founder sits at the head of the call and asks, every week, "Any updates from your side?" And someone, every single week, says "nothing from me." And the meeting runs until the 60-minute mark, at which point someone says, "Great, let's take the rest offline", and everyone returns to their desks slightly more behind than before.

77% of workers frequently attend meetings that end with a decision to schedule a follow-up meeting.

The meeting did not produce an outcome; it produced another meeting. And founders know better than this. Anything that’s not producing an outcome for the goal or vision should be cut, but somehow that recurring meeting is still there.

A resilient creature.

Three Questions To Determine If Your Meeting Should Be an Email

There is a simple way to determine if a meeting should exist or if it should be an email, and it only takes ninety seconds of honest reflection.

Does this require a live response?

If the information can be written, sent, and read at the recipient's convenience without being lost at one end, then it should be an email.

Is there a decision to be made that requires everyone present?

If you can get ten people to each share updates that could have been written in two to three sentences, it should be an email.

If this meeting were cancelled today, what would break?

Is there a decision that would go unmade? A crisis that won't be handled? An output that would flop? 

If there isn't, then it should be an email.

The email would take about 10-15 minutes to write and 2 minutes to read, but with the help of ChatGPT or Claude, it could take about 5 minutes to write and atill 2 minutes to read.

But the meeting would take an hour, for ten people.

And it would produce nothing documented, nothing decided, nothing that would have been better than a well-written paragraph at 9:47 on a Tuesday morning.

What the Email Would Have Said

You knew what needed to be communicated before you even opened the calendar invite. 

It could have been written in a paragraph, sent out before lunch, and in the afternoon, you'd receive responses. Responses that had been well thought out, but you'd rather the response be performed for 45 minutes so that everyone can focus for the rest of the day.

So, you scheduled a meeting.

And ten people sat in a room, or ten small rectangles on a screen and performed the act of communication without the substance of it.

You need the rare confidence to trust that a well-written message will be read, understood, and acted upon without the visual confirmation of nodding heads and the ritual comfort of everyone being in the same virtual room at the same time.

The recurring Wednesday sync has no such insecurity. It simply shows up, every seven days, asking only for your time.

Certain, as always, that you will accept.

“The meeting has been rescheduled for next week.” “Your calendar has been updated.’

One wonder that may never end. One wonder that will keep burning time and energy of your team members. How long did it take you to read this?

Now what if you’re in a Zoom meeting discussing the meeting that should have been an email? What an irony! So is the meeting that should have been an email.

You have the freedom and the tool to choose the meeting that should have been Get conductor