What's the point of this meeting?

Now, more than ever, we need to ask this question! Meetings for meeting's sake only increase meeting fatigue - and there are a slew of folks talking about how to combat it:

• Stanford, "Four causes for 'Zoom fatigue' and their solutions"
  
• MIT Sloan Management Review, "How to Combat Virtual Meeting Fatigue"
  
• Harvard Business Review, "How to Combat Zoom Fatigue"
• Healthline.com, "Zoom Fatigue: Symptoms, Causes, Coping Tips"
• TedTalks, "Zoom fatigue is real - here's why video calls are so draining"
• National Geographic, "Zoom fatigue is taxing the brain. Here's why that happens."
• BBC, "The reason Zoom calls drain your energy"
  
• Mentimeter, "7 ways to fight virtual meeting fatigue"
• Forbes, "Three cures for Virtual Meeting Fatigue"
• Forbes, "Zoom Fatigue is worse for Women"

Number one on Sloan's list of recommendations?  "Cancel unnecessary meetings and make necessary meetings shorter." 

But how do we know if they're necessary or not? AGENDA! Know - and share - the point of the meeting. Is it a knowledge-sharing meeting?  problem-solving? consensus-building? decision-making?  We need to know these things before we can employ appropriate meeting types and fatigue-combating techniques.

This becomes even more important as we start to add virtual reality environments to our online meeting mix. Now that VR has embraced immersive remote meetings and conventions for day-to-day use, it can become part of the existing problem or we can use it as a reason to adjust our expectations and behavior.  According to Bradford Frank, a senior client partner in Korn Ferry's Technology practice, "The key to smart utilization is for leaders to ask themselves what a meeting is trying to accomplish" (emphasis mine). And while I hate to throw these things back at "leadership," this is one of those "back to basics" moments that people in authority need to embrace before they ask their staff to do the same.      

With thanks to ifunny.co and everyone else who rocked this meme!