Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s latest memo didn’t just cover RTO. It also tackled something that employees and leaders alike love to hate: the recurring meeting.
The memo, titled “Building a Winning Culture in 2026,” said that recurring meetings will be canceled every six months and only re-added if “absolutely necessary.” He also encouraged making recurring one-on-ones biweekly “by default” and said employees should decline meetings that interfere with “focus blocks.”
“We all spend too much time in meetings that are not effective, and it’s slowing us down,” Mosseri wrote.
Mosseri’s crackdown on meetings echoes a growing chorus of executives frustrated by bureaucratic sluggishness. As AI tools introduce a new era of workplace efficiency and competition ramps up, leaders are rethinking culture from the ground up — trimming layers, streamlining processes, and doubling down on speed and efficiency.
Leaders are rejecting meeting-heavy workplaces
Many CEOs and billionaires have long held strong opinions on meetings. Jeff Bezos has favored “messy” meetings, while Airbnb’s Brian Chesky and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang prefer to eliminate one-on-ones altogether.
Others view the practice as a distraction from real work. Elon Musk has argued large meetings should be eliminated or kept “very short,” and billionaire investor (and lover of emails) Mark Cuban has similarly said meetings derail his productivity.
“I try to only do meetings if I have to come to a conclusion or there’s no other way — same with phone calls,” Cuban said in 2023. “It kills so much time.”
The debate over meetings has only grown louder as efficiency takes center stage across corporate America. In Jamie Dimon’s 2024 annual letter to shareholders, the JPMorgan CEO said he wants to “kill meetings” because it slows work down.
Earlier this year, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he wants to bring back in-person collaboration, while also limiting the “pre-meeting for the pre-meeting for the decision.” The tech giant recently cut 14,000 workers in a push to revive a scrappier, startup-like culture.
Reversing the pro-meeting trend
Benjamin Laker, a leadership professor at the Henley Business School who has researched effective meeting structures, told Business Insider that in the post-pandemic era, there was a “huge acceleration” of meetings, both in frequency and volume.
Laker said that psychological factors, like heightened loneliness and anxiety during the pandemic, contributed to this rise in meetings, as they offered a way to regain a sense of connection.
Petri Lehtonen, CEO of the meeting analytics platform Flowtrace, told Business Insider that the company’s data indicates that 50% to 70% of total meeting hours in large companies come from recurring slots, and many companies find those standing meetings don’t always have a clear purpose. The crackdown on meetings isn’t just a cultural trend, but “a structural correction,” Lehtonen said.
That’s why executives like Mosseri may be re-examining the habit, he said. Lehtonen said that as collaboration becomes increasingly asynchronous, due to AI-generated summary tools, companies are shifting from thinking of “meetings by default” to “meetings as escalation tools.”
Restoring balance
In the aftermath of the pandemic, some companies have taken more radical approaches to reducing meetings.
In 2023, Shopify’s bosses introduced a plug-in to track the dollar amount spent during meetings, a move the COO said at the time was aimed at reducing meetings so employees could actually “get shit done.”
Others, like Salesforce, took a less extreme approach. The company tried a no-meetings week in 2021 to give employees a break from the disruptions, and ended up implementing three more no-meetings weeks. Other companies like Citi, gave meeting-free Fridays.
In a yearlong survey of 76 companies published in MIT’s Sloan Management Review in 2022, Laker wrote that productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. However, Laker said that the advantages of no-meeting periods began to plateau after meetings were reduced by 60%, and diminished beyond that.
Laker said the best way to keep meetings effective is to set clear boundaries, such as a maximum number of attendees, a 24-hour notice period before the meeting, an agenda, and a set timeframe.
“As long as you have meeting hygiene, you don’t have to eliminate meetings altogether,” Laker said.
