This Simple Fix Can Help You End Meeting Overload for Good

Last year, I worked with a global hybrid team that had grown fairly fast. They had people in the United States, Europe and Asia, and the team truly cared about the work. Everyone in the team showed up prepared.

But something odd kept happening.

Their meetings kept getting longer, and weekly “syncs” turned into 90-minute sessions. Not only that, their check-ins doubled, and their project calls began to stack on top of each other. People often joked that their real work started after hours, when they entered what they dubbed the “night shift.”

Leaders certainly felt the pressure because, despite being busy all day, the output kept slowing down. As a result, they kept adding meetings because, in their minds, the team needed more time to align. Instead, the pace of the work dropped yet again.

They were confused because they believed more talk would solve the problem, but instead, it kept getting worse. Much worse.

When I joined them, my first job was to watch how they worked. So, I sat through their calls, listened to how they made choices and paid close attention to the moments where energy dropped. After two days, the source of the slowdown became clear.

The real problem wasn’t the meetings. It was the total loss of ownership inside the meetings.

Meetings expand when ownership fades

Leaders often think one of the reasons meetings grow is that the team is too detailed or too cautious. What I see in many global hybrid teams is much simpler.

The team doesn’t know who owns the last set of decisions.

When this happens, people do the same thing regardless of whether the team is a business or technical team. Here’s what they do:

• They come together, hoping someone else will make things clear

• They revisit topics they covered last week because no one is sure who decided what

• They retry ideas they talked through before because no one holds the final call

• They repeat the same debate across three different calls because there’s no shared record of decisions

The result is that meetings grow because decisions don’t stick.

In the global team I worked with, this showed up in small moments. For instance, someone said they would “take a look at a plan,” but no one knew what that meant specifically.

Someone agreed to “review the next steps,” but no one knew when they would do it. People wanted to move forward, but didn’t know who had the authority to close an item.

Those small gaps created big slowdowns.

You can’t fix meeting overload with more meetings

This is the trap many leaders commonly fall into. When the team slows down, they add more meetings so people can align because they think more time together will fix the confusion.

Unfortunately, it actually does the opposite.

A meeting can help if the goal is clear and someone drives the next steps. Otherwise, a meeting becomes a hindrance when the group is trying to figure out ownership while they’re talking.

This is why meeting overload feels so frustrating. Everyone can see the problem, but no one can name it. People think they’ve got a scheduling challenge when in reality, what they have is a clarity challenge.

The solution is for you to intentionally reduce meetings by strengthening ownership, not by shifting calendars.

The global team’s turning point came from a simple step

After watching their sessions, I asked for a short working session with the core leadership group. We looked at the last ten decisions they had made. Then I asked a simple question for each one.

Who made this call?

They went quiet.

They looked through notes, checked messages and searched for email threads that might help. They sincerely wanted to answer, but they couldn’t.

They were smart, committed and honestly trying hard. But they had no shared view of ownership.

As soon as they saw this, things started to move forward.

I helped them shift to a clean structure.

• Every decision needed a clear owner.

• Every action needed a clear owner.

• Every next step needed a clear owner.

They didn’t need a heavy or complicated framework. They just needed shared language and a simple habit.

By the end of the session, they could see the link between missing ownership and growing meeting hours.

The root causes of problems were identified:

• People had been doing extra calls because work somehow slipped through cracks.

• They had been repeating topics because decisions were soft.

• They had been stuck in loops because no one was sure who had the right to close out a question.

As soon as ownership got clear, meetings shrank.

The reason hybrid and global teams feel the pain faster

Hybrid teams can be effective, but they tend to have to deal with more friction points. Here are some examples:

• Time zones stretch the work.

• Messages cross paths.

• People miss small signals in video calls.

• Progress updates happen at different moments in the day.

When a team is in the same room, missing ownership still slows the work, but at least people can catch each other in the hallway and can talk something through before it grows. Gaps are fixed fairly informally.

In a hybrid team, on the other hand, missing ownership creates a gap that no one sees until the next scheduled meeting. That delay creates a second delay and another, and soon the team is holding more meetings just to fix the damage from the last set of meetings.

In the moment, it feels like it’s a time problem; however, it’s really an ownership problem.

The one mistake leaders make that makes this worse

When meetings start to feel heavy, a lot of leaders react from instinct. What they typically do is tighten agendas, shorten time blocks and reduce the number of attendees. While these are indeed good moves, the problem is that they don’t solve the root cause.

A meeting isn’t often long because the agenda is weak. More often than not, a meeting is long because the team is trying to make sense of ownership that should’ve been clear before the meeting began.

In my experience, this is the biggest reason why meeting cuts fail.

Leaders shrink a meeting, but the work behind the meeting isn’t clear. The confusion spreads, and the team works later. The decisions, meanwhile, get slower.

I see this pattern in growing companies of all sizes, around the globe and across different industry sectors. Leaders believe they’ve created a “fast” culture. They want to move quickly, and their teams work hard, but the structure behind the work has holes.

And those holes slow everything down.

How to create meetings that move work forward

The good news is that you can shrink your meetings and speed up your work at the same time. You just need to intentionally bring ownership back into the center.

Here are three steps to help leaders do this with very little friction:

• Start with a clear owner for every decision: If a decision has no owner, the meeting will grow until someone tries to fill the gap.

• Name the next step in simple language: If the next step is not clear, the team will revisit the topic in the next meeting.

• Close each meeting with a shared record: If the team cannot see what was decided, they will repeat the discussion.

These steps seem simple, but they’re powerful when leaders apply them with discipline.

The global team I supported used these steps for two weeks, and the results were truly impressive.

• Their meeting count dropped.

• Their syncs became shorter.

• People felt less stressed.

• The pace picked up again.

They didn’t hire more people, add new software or change their goals. They did, however, make ownership visible.

Clarity always pays you back

The leaders in this story were doing their best. They were committed and were pushing hard. Their problem wasn’t effort. Their problem was structure, and this is the part that surprises many founders and execs.

They think work slows because the team isn’t fast enough.

They think meetings grow because the team talks too much.

They think progress drops because the team needs more direction.

They miss the hidden truth that when ownership is unclear, even great teams slow down.

Once leaders fix that, the work moves again.

Leaders who intentionally build clarity into the center of their work never need to force speed, because their teams create it.