The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In

Brenda Fernandez has tried blocking off time on her calendar. She’s tried to keep conversations focused. She still can’t escape them.

“Everything becomes a meeting,” the 29-year-old Miami copywriter told me. Her overwhelming feeling? “This could have been an email.”

Then she excused herself to hop on a 7 p.m. call.

We are deep in the age of the never-ending check-in. Meetings have gotten shorter during the pandemic, according to researchers, with one paper finding the average length dropped 20% in late 2020.

But meetings are multiplying. There’s the 25-minute client touch-base, the general life catch-up with your manager, the bite-size performance feedback session, the meeting to prep for the meeting.

“It just never ends,” Ms. Fernandez says.

We were already on the road to meeting burnout before the pandemic. A shift from hierarchical organisations to de-layered, matrixed ones means more bosses and teams to coordinate with. Increasingly global business means invites for times when we’d normally be in bed. Caroline Kim Oh, a leadership coach based near New York City, says that in recent years, many of her clients have started feeling like meetings are just something that happens to them.

“You have no control over your workday,” she says. “They’re just popping up.”

Working from home and living through a crisis seems to have made it worse. In an April survey from meeting scheduling tool Doodle, 69% of 1,000 full-time remote workers said their meetings had increased since the pandemic started, with 56% reporting that their swamped calendars were hurting their job performance.

Constant check-ins have become some bosses’ version of micromanaging, a way to keep tabs on workers they don’t trust. Coordination that used to happen by swivelling your chair or walking across the hall now requires extra formality and time for everyone still spread out across home offices. Plus, there’s the sense that empathetic leaders should stay in touch during moments of transition, whether that’s as the world was shutting down last year or as we head back to headquarters now.

The message to managers is often, “Hey, check in with your employees. See if they’re OK. Care more,” says Ms. Kim Oh, the executive coach. Sometimes caring more means saving a worker from one more Zoom, she adds.

What happens next? If we all go back to work five days a week, we might return to those efficient, in-person check-ins, says Raffaella Sadun, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied meeting loads before and during the pandemic. But organisations testing a hybrid set-up should brace for a mess.

There are now two kinds of interactions to manage, Dr. Sadun says. “One is at the water cooler, one is on Zoom.” If you make a decision with the colleague who sits one desk over, you still need to dial up the teammate who spends Tuesdays at home to make sure she’s on board. Suddenly, all Zoom all the time doesn’t seem so bad.

Nonetheless, many employees are optimistic that things will get better. In the Doodle survey, 70% of respondents said they hope to have fewer meetings once they head back to the office. Angela Nguyen, an independent healthcare consultant in Boston, predicts workers will return to the good old days of back-to-back meetings, as opposed to the double- and triple-booked schedules she sees now.

“It’s not sustainable,” she says. She has watched clients attempt to divide and conquer, hopping on for 15-minute cameos or dispatching various team members to different video calls. Then they sync up after—with another meeting.

Did we all just get used to having our professional contacts a click away for all these months, without travel time or personal plans as a natural boundary? Does loneliness play a role?

“I wonder if people just want to connect, just to chat, because they don’t have an office to go to,” Ms. Nguyen says.

Overall, employees have been putting in five to eight additional working hours a week during the pandemic, says Rob Cross, a professor of global leadership at Babson College and author of the forthcoming book, “Beyond Collaboration Overload.” More meetings mean more tasks to catch up on at day’s end, when we finally have a minute to take a look at our ballooning to-do lists. Plus, toggling between more, shorter meetings is hugely taxing on our brains.

“They’ve created work that they don’t see,” Dr. Cross says of organizations. “That’s crushing people.”

Becca Apfelstadt’s team at marketing agency Treetree headed back to their Columbus, Ohio, office last month for two half-days a week. The CEO’s verdict on meetings is: They’re no worse than before. Early in the pandemic, workers complained they didn’t have time to grab water or use the bathroom. “It was like, we won’t survive if we can’t figure this out,” she says.

The company moved some communication to messaging services such as Slack, trimmed meetings to 20 or 50 minutes and encouraged walk-and-talk conversations, using AI services to take notes.

The efforts helped, Ms. Apfelstadt says, and so far the shift to hybrid hasn’t created any meeting creep. Still, there have been hiccups. The other week, she spotted three employees crammed onto a couch together, attempting to share one laptop camera for a video conference.

“They just had some tiny person in the middle, and she was just getting smushed any time someone would try to make a point,” Ms. Apfelstadt says. She recommends companies keep the formal meeting schedule light as they transition back and lean into serendipitous conversations around the office.

Still, not everyone is craving those. Seanna Thompson, a physician and administrator with New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, has loved her remote meetings over the last year-plus. The dread comes when she thinks about returning to those ad-hoc, meandering check-ins by the water cooler.

“I’m like, oh God, that just derailed my whole day,” she says. “I don’t think what we were doing before was all that efficient.”

When couples argue over money, the real source of the conflict usually isn’t on their bank statement.

Financial disagreements tend to be stand-ins for deeper issues in our relationships, researchers and couples counsellors said, since the way we use money is a reflection of our values, character and beliefs. Persistent fights over spending and saving often doom romantic partnerships: Even if you fix the money problem, the underlying issues remain.

To understand what the fights are really about, new research from social scientists at Carleton University in Ottawa began with a unique data set: more than 1,000 posts culled from a relationship forum on the social-media platform Reddit. Money was a major thread in the posts, which largely broke down into complaints about one-sided decision-making, uneven contributions, a lack of shared values and perceived unfairness or irresponsibility.

By analysing and categorising the candid messages, then interviewing hundreds of couples, the researchers said they have isolated some of the recurring patterns behind financial conflicts.

The research found that when partners disagree about mundane expenses, such as grocery bills and shop receipts, they tend to have better relationships. Fights about fair contributions to household finances and perceived financial irresponsibility are particularly detrimental, however.

While there is no cure-all to resolve the disputes, the antidote in many cases is to talk about money more, not less, said Johanna Peetz, a professor of psychology at Carleton who co-authored the study.

“You should discuss finances more in relationships, because then small things won’t escalate into bigger problems,” she said.

A partner might insist on taking a vacation the other can’t afford. Another married couple might want to separate their previously combined finances. Couples might also realize they no longer share values they originally brought to the relationship.

Recognise patterns

Differentiating between your own viewpoint on the money fight from that of your partner is no easy feat, said Thomas Faupl, a marriage and family psychotherapist in San Francisco. Where one person sees an easily solvable problem—overspending on groceries—the other might see an irrevocable rift in the relationship.

Faupl, who specialises in helping couples work through financial difficulties, said many partners succeed in finding common ground that can keep them connected amid heated discussions. Identifying recurring themes in the most frequent conflicts also helps.

“There is something very visceral about money, and for a lot of people, it has to do with security and power,” he said. “There’s permutations on the theme, and that could be around responsibility, it could be around control, it could be around power, it could be around fairness.”

Barbara Krenzer and John Stone first began their relationship more than three decades ago. Early on in their conversations, the Syracuse, N.Y.-based couple opened up about what they both felt to be most important in life: spending quality time with family and investing in lifelong memories.

“We didn’t buy into the big lifestyle,” Krenzer said. “Time is so important and we both valued that.”

For Krenzer and Stone, committing to that shared value meant making sacrifices. Krenzer, a physician, reduced her work hours while raising their three children. Stone trained as an attorney, but once Krenzer went back to full-time work, he looked for a job that let him spend the mornings with the children.

“Compromise: That’s a word they don’t say enough with marriage,” Krenzer said. “You have to get beyond the love and say, ‘Do I want to compromise for them and find that middle ground?’”

Money talks

Talking about numbers behind a behaviour can help bring a couple out of a fight and back to earth, Faupl said. One partner might rue the other’s tightfistedness, but a discussion of the numbers reveals the supposed tightwad is diligently saving money for the couple’s shared future.

“I get under the hood with people so we can get black-and-white numbers on the table,” he said. “Are these conversations accurate, or are they somehow emotionally based?”

Couples might follow tenets of good financial management and build wealth together, but conflict is bound to arise if one partner feels the other isn’t honouring that shared commitment, Faupl said.

“If your partner helps with your savings goals, then that feels instrumental to your own goals, and that is a powerful drive for feeling close to the partner and valuing that relationship,” he said.

A sense of mission

When it comes to sticking out the hard times, “sharing values is important, even more so than sharing personality traits,” Peetz said. In her own research, Peetz found that romantic partners who disagreed about shared values could one day split up as a result.

“That is the crux of the conflict often: They each have a different definition,” she said of themes such as fairness and responsibility.

And sometimes, it is worth it to really dig into the potentially difficult conversations around big money decisions. When things are working well, coming together to achieve these common goals—such as saving for your own retirement or preparing for your children’s financial future—will create intimacy, not money strife.

“That is a powerful drive for feeling close to the partner and valuing that relationship,” she said.

The Pain of the Never-Ending Work Check-In

Meeting burnout got worse in the pandemic; hybrid schedules could make things even messier

New research tackles the source of financial conflict and what we can do about it

Recognise patterns

Money talks

A sense of mission