At work, does your default meeting length facilitate a gap between back-to-backs?

[headcold]

I work for a large organisation where hybrid working is the norm, and many people's diaries are filled with back-to-back meetings - usually 30 mins or 60 mins in length. Most meetings start with people apologising for their lateness. Sadly, this is worse for in-person meetings, because people obviously need to move around the building.

We use MS Outlook for our calendars, and it is easy change the settings to systematically shorten meetings by a few minutes - e.g. by 5 mins for every 30 minute slot. I do this, but it only applies when I book meetings in other people's diaries, not when others book meetings with me. I know some employers have this as a default setting for everyone, so that short breaks between meetings are coordinated consistently. If your employer does this, does it work well?

Nope!

I've worked as an assistant for large organisations and its an on going problem. We tried scheduling 25 or 50 minutes meetings, tried some meetings starting at 15 or 45 (instead of on the hour) to allow 15 minutes in between big meetings.

But the problem is too many unnecessary meetings, lack of efficiency in the meetings (lots of blah blah), meetings running over time etc. I don't know if it's possible to manage your calendar time well under these conditions!

Yes it's our default. It doesn't stop people being late but if you're not habitually late the 5 min gap is valuable for toilet break/grabbinig a coffee. Personally if I have back to back meetings and one is overrunning, I drop at the proper end point anyway.

Quite often things run back to back. But I have one amazing colleague who schedules meetings from 5 past the hour until 5 to the next hour, which makes all the difference!

We have a company policy where short meetings should be 25 mins and longer ones 50 mins. Our calendars are all set up like that by default. However in reality the meetings themselves pretty much always run the full 30 mins, or the full hour. Everyone ignores the stop point and just runs to the hour (or longer frequently).

My calendar isn't back to back at the moment, but when we have been in busy periods previously, I have been known to insist that the shortened format is stuck to properly, or to announce I have to drop from the meeting at the end time to allow time before the next call. No one has ever bothered me for it, it is company policy after all. It's a good policy, if the meeting owner is prepared to enforce it. But all too often I find the meeting owners are not great at actually managing meetings, and that's where things fall down.

Whenever the 25/50 minute thing is used at my work, it’s usually ignored and the meetings overrun and then there’s no benefit.

It might work if the meeting started late, as some people would likely need to wrap up on the hour, but if everyone was starting the next meeting late it wouldn’t make a difference.

I’m in charge of my own diary though so I just make sure it doesn’t back to back for the whole day or I put in one hour slots for meetings I know will only take 30 mins to build redundancy into my day.

Yes, it's encouraged for everyone in the business to set default meetings to 25 or 55 minutes instead of a full hour or half hour.

Nope occasionally someone will book it for quarter past but often people don’t realise and go on the normal time anyway

No, that's too much like common sense.

And yes, I am bitter about having non stop meetings between 11.30-3pm today.

No ours are all back to back.
Worse in hybrid meeting rooms as it doesn't allow people time to end their meeting and get out the room for the next one to start. It will depend who is there but sometimes its a "oh we're just finishing up" followed by 5.morw minutes of gathering things etc

Ours is 25 and 50 min I think, and it’s fine for people to drop if they have another meeting or stick to the time. People generally check if it’s ok to go over. I’m lucky I don’t have a meeting-heavy job. Once when we had analysts come in when we were moving to hot desking they couldn’t believe the amount of meetings going on!

I'm currently not working but my last job was for an American company. They liked back-to-back meetings, standing meetings, and meetings for everything (when it could have just been an email).
The didn't like you taking lunch breaks, leaving your desk, leaving or arriving at the time your contract said (you were expected to arrive early, leave late, and eat at your desk).