Meeting Spillover
Measure how much capacity the Meeting Spillover drain is costing your team every month
Your Team
Meeting Spillover — Quality Check
Research* shows Meeting Spillover has a direct impact on capacity, trust, and execution speed:
- 71% of senior managers say meetings are unproductive and inefficient
- 65% of meetings prevent people from completing their own work
- Only 50% of meeting time is considered well spent by attendees
- Teams with clear meeting disciplines make better decisions faster
*Sources:
- Meeting effectiveness: Harvard Business Review, "Stop the Meeting Madness" (2017, updated 2024)
- Scoring model anchored to HBR baseline: average meeting = 50% effective; range 20% to 80% based on seven quality indicators
- Time in meetings: Bain and Company, "The Time-Starved Executive" study
Think about how your team's meetings typically run. For each statement, choose the option that best reflects your reality.
Your Meeting Spillover — The Drain
*Effectiveness scoring anchored to Harvard Business Review research which found that the average meeting operates at 50% effectiveness. Your score reflects how your team compares to that baseline.
And this does not include the cost of decisions made without full information, the frustration of people who leave unclear about what was agreed, or the repeat meetings relitigating what should have been resolved first time.
Plug this drain this week
Pick one meeting this week and apply these four disciplines. Just one. See what changes.
Ready to plug this drain?
The Find & Fix Session is a focused 20-minute diagnostic on where your team's time is actually going, built around what you've just found. You'll leave with one practical fix to start applying this week.
Book the Find & Fix SessionCurious about your other drains? See all six — but Meeting Spillover is where we'd start.
Productivity Pit Stop · www.productivitypitstop.co.za · 082 PERFORM · We do not manage time. We recover it.