As a person who decides when the meetings of the day are, if you heard employees whine about how many meetings there are, would you consider making a change? I know I'm being reasonable when I schedule the meetings that are currently in place so I don't know if the right thing to do is just brush it off and keep things the same or consider changing things around.

I think getting feedback on which meetings are not seen as productive and why would be helpful. You could send out an anonymous survey if you don’t trust people would be honest. Maybe a meeting can be shortened or combined with another for efficiency.

I'd consider the employees opinions, How many hours of meetings are there a week? How many of those meetings could have been an email or at least a shorter meeting? Can the meetings be every other week or once a month instead of weekly.
People need to work. If their days are constantly being disrupted with meetings it can really disrupt the flow of their day.
You think you're being reasonable, but are you being reasonable to the needs of the other people involved?
Widen your lens and look at it that way.

You have the opportunity and ability to see the big picture. I would hear them out and see why they think that there are a lot of meetings, but if meetings need to be had meetings need to be had.

I like the suggestion of asking which meetings are and are not bringing value. Perhaps it’s how they are structured. Can you also enable at your team level
A group focus time? My entire company has 2hr of focus time on Tues/thur meant for deep work. Perhaps that would work too?

“Whine about” -> I think you’ve already made up your mind. Tbh I don’t remember having so many meetings before covid, Zoom has changed the way we work and I would definitely hear them out, your team is the best people to answer this question.

I’m confused. Did you overhear this at work or are you the one speaking?

Whoa, Hex, you got there first on a couple of mine. In the Army, I got a “Stand Up Brief” from my staff each morning to start the day. Just a quick around the horn (everybody stood) to touch base and align priorities but also allowed for coordination between staff sections. For full meetings, my #2 was tasked to keep things rolling. Anything not related to at least 3 different staff sections was instructed to be handled offline outside the meeting. Follow-ups were done by email or quick phone call or even text. I held open hours each day when when possible for signatures and quick hits. And here is a key: if you find you don’t need to meet, either cancel it or just have those show up you do need to meet with. Trust me - they will not complain about being uninvited. Lastly, if your team comes away from a meeting feeling it could have been handled in 3 emails or less, you have failed as a leader. I was a military commodity manager (beans, bullets, trucks, warehouses), but the two most important commodities in ANY organization are time and people. Take care of both.

Definitely take that feedback into account. Have a think about:

1. What each person genuinely gets out of the meeting.

2. How to have those meetings unobtrusively. Maximise on focus time if that's what your team needs

Our Ops person has us evaluate our recurring meetings quarterly and if you don’t find it helpful or that your presence is needed routinely, if enough people share that it is unnecessary then it is removed. All new meetings are required to have an agenda or they are cancelled. I am down to about 8 meetings a week and while that still seems like a lot, I had a point last year where I had 19 recurring meetings that were either weekly or every other week.

You need to consider the type of workers who are attending meetings. Managers/Directors generally have many meetings to discuss strategies, approaches - the actual work is done by those below them. If there are too many meetings for the people do the actual work, it is interfering with their workflow and should be a consideration for sure.

I would listen. Our co took a hard look at the number of meetings and who was in each meeting. We removed people from meetings if they weren't benefitting. We created a better structure for the meetings to be more efficient. Our employees are much happier with the change. Its one of the easiest and most cost efficient changes to make and have employees that fee the company actually listened for a change.

i would definitely take that as really good information to work on and make sure that the employees are getting enough time to work on their own loads and see meetings as an important and necessary driver to the work they do. If you happened to get negative feedback even without trying, that's the best case scenario. Use it to yours and your team's advantage.

I’m curious how many reoccurring meetings people think are reasonable per week? Depends on the team size but for me more than three weekly group meetings seems like a lot.

First, I'd stop and look at your language. Before you've even finished writing out your question, you've become adversarial to your team. Meaning, you're not treating them like a team. "Whine", "I know I'm being reasonable"...these indicate you're frustrated, but you can find better ways to communicate that and also be in a productive headspace.

Ask your team, as mentioned, what is and is not beneficial. Iterate on it, "Hey, this week we're going to try it without a couple of these meetings that you've indicated have low value." or something like that.

Meetings exist for communication, if there is no communication happening...the meeting is just wasted time. If your meetings are being dominated by the same subset of people and others are not able to speak...that meeting is wasted time for those people. And it's dangerous time for your team.

Find out why the meetings are not perceived as useful.
And let go of the hurt attitude.

If the meetings are effective and things are getting done not sure lesson the need for meetings but if there is still a lot of meetings and there’s no point in having more meetings because nothing is changing and people aren’t doing what needs to be done so that’s probably why it becomes annoying day after day

I interviewed at a company years ago that had an interesting approach to meetings:

-- No meeting can go over 20 minutes.
-- No non-management person can have more that 2 meetings a day.
-- The meeting organizer must prepare and submit a meeting agenda 1 day before the meeting.
-- No one could call out in the meeting unless selected to do so first.
-- An assigned meeting monitor would derail any topics not on the agenda and kept the time clock.
-- Unless there was physical need, attendees had to stand for the meeting.

How many meetings are you having? I’ve heard some managers book daily meetings and I cannnnot imagine.

Meeting aren't always productive. They can take away from actual productive tasks. What is the purpose of so many meetings? Keeping people in the loop? Getting updates? Maybe the same information can be relayed in an email. It's an office joke that we should schedule a meeting on how to reduce the number of meetings.

I would welcome open discussion for all to air views and to brainstorm ideas for alternatives to numerous meetings. Time to create a meetings policy to make best use of time and show how much staff time is valued. Give choices such as shorter smaller group mtgs or informal clusters compared to a scheduled larger longer meeting for example.
Also think a