ADVICE: Optimizing meetings, a critical post-pandemic task for physician leaders

Abstract

Meetings and committees occupy a significant amount of the working time of physician leaders and their teams. The amount of time spent in meetings has grown over decades and that growth has rapidly accelerated over the COVID-19 pandemic. The return to in-person work offers physician leaders the opportunity to optimize their meetings by thinking about the entire suite of meetings they and their teams are involved in. Creating a meeting inventory and evaluating it can reveal patterns, inefficiencies, and redundancies that can become targets for optimization. Effective meetings can create a competitive advantage for leaders, teams, and organizations and can support productivity and job satisfaction. Meeting optimization should be a high priority for physician leaders.