Dive Brief:
- In the wake of a reconfiguration of company meeting culture, a connection is emerging between employee retention and meeting attendance, according to data from workspace collaboration analytics company Vyopta.
- Employees who would later leave their company were in 46% fewer one-on-one meetings than non-departing counterparts, the report found. Vyopta based its research on anonymized metadata from 48 million virtual meetings in 10 separate enterprise organizations.
- Employees who would later leave their company were 22% less likely to have hosted meetings, the study found.
Dive Insight:
While the numbers do not indicate a causation between meeting attendance and retention, the correlation is indicative of broader changes playing out in meeting culture at the enterprise level.
A previous Vyopta report, published Dec. 7, showed a clear pivot toward smaller company meetings. The average number of meeting participants shrunk by half this year, down to 10 from 20 in 2020.
“This is data that can be useful in particular for managers to really understand the importance of one-on-ones with their direct reports, and to encourage the one-on-ones with colleagues as well,” said Mike Tolliver, director of product management at Vyopta.
The downside to more frequent, shorter organizational touchpoints is a fragmentation of the worker schedule, Tolliver said. This results in having fewer, more fragmented blocks of time allotted for heads-down, deep focus work.
Information silos are also interrupting the day of the average worker.
Wading through dozens of apps, employees spend more than two hours a day, on average, finding the data needed to do their jobs effectively, according to a Forrester report commissioned by Airtable.
One strategy leaders can deploy to address issues in the work day is to be more intentional about meeting cadence and scheduling. Designated meeting-free days are a potential policy solution.
“Those kinds of policies don’t reduce the number of meetings, but they compact them into certain times that are more dedicated towards collaboration,” said Tolliver. “That leaves open other times that are more dedicated towards focus work.”
