Hybrid work promised us the best of both worlds: the calm of home for focused work, and the office for real collaboration. For many employees, the reality turns out differently. The working day is packed with meeting after meeting, and the actual work keeps getting pushed to the evening hours.
How did we get here?
It starts with a simple fact: organising a meeting has become technically easier than ever. A Teams link or Zoom invitation takes thirty seconds to send. No meeting room needed, no reservation, no commute. That low threshold has created a culture where the meeting has become the default response to almost every issue.
Add to that the fact that hybrid work has removed an important by-product of office work: informal contact. The quick question at the coffee machine, the brief chat at a colleague’s desk, the chance encounter in the hallway. All those small interactions disappear when people are no longer together every day. And what replaces them? Schedule a meeting, of course.
Microsoft studied the behaviour of millions of users and recorded a 252% increase in the time employees spend in meetings per week compared to before the pandemic. That is not a minor shift — it is a fundamental change in how the working day looks.
The 30-minute meeting as the default solution
Take a look at your own calendar. Chances are your day consists of thirty- or sixty-minute blocks, neatly lined up one after the other. The 30-minute meeting has evolved into a kind of universal answer to all collaboration questions, regardless of whether the problem actually required a short chat message, a shared document, or simply a little patience.
The result is predictable: employees hop from meeting to meeting, with no time to process information, follow up on decisions, or simply think things through.
More people, more time zones, more coordination
Distributed teams across multiple time zones add an extra layer of complexity. Collaborating simultaneously with colleagues in London, Warsaw and Amsterdam inevitably requires more coordination. This results in overlapping meeting slots, early morning calls and a constant pressure to remain reachable.
What gets lost?
Author and professor Cal Newport calls it deep work: the focused, uninterrupted working time that leads to high-quality output. That is precisely what disappears when the calendar is full. Employees are busy, present, attending meetings. But whether they are actually getting anything done is a different question.
What can organisations do?
Some companies are experimenting with meeting-free days, preferably on Fridays. Others are limiting recurring meetings or introducing a ‘meeting cost calculator’ that makes visible what an hour-long meeting with ten people actually costs. The shared insight: a meeting should be a conscious choice, not an automatism.
Hybrid work is here to stay. But the way we practise it deserves a more critical look. Because a full calendar is not yet a productive day.