During this pandemic, meeting fatigue has been more than real. Where you might have had a slight reprieve moving from meeting room to meeting room, now all you get is the dreaded alert on Teams that your next meeting has already started, so you wrap up your current one and jump onto the next, with no break in between, kinda like this sentence.
A couple of the clients I've worked with over this past 18 months have tried building in a 5-minute buffer but this hardly works, because everyone knows you have nowhere else to go and so they have a kind of monopoly on your time. Couple this with some places employing a 2-minute wait time before starting the meeting it's like you're bound by these rules at the risk of missing something important. Albeit everyone knows the first 2 minutes of any meeting are usually intros or the usual awkward comments on the weather.
So why do we need more meetings in this new way of working? What I've found is, that those casual conversations you'd have when walking over to a colleagues desk, or catching them in a break-out area are all gone. Everything needs to be structured and organised, kind of dulling the magic of the hot-desk collaborative culture we'd been building up to before the pandemic. Sure you can call a colleague quickly, but there's a certain etiquette where you feel like you have to message them first, or at least there is in my case. So now, organising a meeting for a quick discussion turns into calendar juggling, and then, the opportunity for colleagues to extend the invite, before you know it, a quick 5-minute conversation has turned into a 3-hour meeting with 30 people!
Sometimes these newer larger meetings are more helpful, as things can get signed off there and then, but, it's the smaller more candid conversations that are missed. Where you can chat about things other than work for a few minutes and build those more lasting relationships with colleagues where you have an interest in each others lives.
The essence of collaborative working as we once knew it is disintegrating, the new style, what I describe as "WhatsApp Working" has taken over, always available, always messaging. To think this is what some of us remember growing up, coming back from school to jump on MSN or Yahoo messenger to chat with friends. Its an interesting paradigm shift in the working world, one that we'll all have to adapt to, I just hope that we don't totally lose the magic of the casual chat vs. the structured Teams/Zoom meeting.