Meetings have been engraved in us as a necessary function in business. In movies and tv shows, we see business meetings being conducted in elaborate board rooms. We see business people in expensive suits meeting over lunch. We have entire courses in our education system dedicated to teach us about meetings. We’re constantly being bombarded with the flawed notion that meetings are necessary to run a successful business.

Although meetings could help align your team with the company’s vision, taking everyone away from their job for an hour is very inefficient and counterproductive. There are far more effective ways to engage and communicate with your team and not pulling them out of their zone.

No one enjoys meetings. Often times, they just seem to be actionless without a clear direction, leaving employees thinking “Cool, now let me get back to work.”.

There are a countless number of apps that weren’t around a decade ago, which is why meetings were necessary back then. The new way of working is changing this archaic notion. Today, tools such as Trello and Slack, for example, allow companies to be totally transparent, aligned, and super-productive, without having to conduct a single face-to-face. Some of the most successful SaaS companies are not only completely remote, but are scrapping the meeting altogether, and taking over at the same time.

Might be time to re-write those textbooks!