“This meeting could have been an email.” It’s a line on our swag and it’s one of eight lines I use in presentations when I want participants to immediately identify with Omnia behavioral dimensions. Every time, the same people laugh the hardest at this particular phrase. On the Omnia Assessment, these individuals usually score high on Column 4. They don’t dislike people. They dislike unnecessary meetings and they believe most are.
They have a point. But they’re only half right.
I once worked for a company that held very few meetings. It sounds like a dream until you live it. Everything ran through email. You could spend an entire day responding to messages, close your laptop feeling productive, and realize you hadn’t touched a single one of your major priorities. You weren’t doing your job. You weren’t doing any deep thinking. You were reacting to everyone else’s.
So this isn’t a blog about killing meetings. It’s harder than that. This is about choosing the right way to communicate for the situation and the people involved. Leaders make that choice dozens of times a week, usually without thinking about it. Added up, those choices shape your team dynamics, how people feel about their work, and a big part of what your culture is.
Why do meetings and email say so much about company culture?
Because how a company communicates shows what it values, and people feel that every day. A calendar packed with status meetings can signal a lack of trust. An inbox full of 20-reply threads can signal that everyone is trying to look good, but nobody wants to have the hard conversation.
Most companies lean too hard one way. Researchers writing in Harvard Business Review found that executives spend nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s, and 71% of the senior managers they surveyed called meetings unproductive and inefficient. Email isn’t the rescue, either. Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index found the average worker receives 117 emails a day and gets interrupted every two minutes by a meeting, email, or notification.
Leaders are trying. Omnia’s 2026 Talent Trends data, based on 451 respondents across 21 industries, shows 73.8% of organizations now hold regular one-on-one meetings, up from 71.3% the year before. More dialogue is a good thing. But more time together only helps if the format fits the conversation and the people in it.
What's the real problem: too many meetings or too many emails?
Neither. The real problem is defaulting.
Most leaders default to the way they like to communicate. If you think out loud, you schedule a meeting. If you want a paper trail, you send an email. Either way, you’re designing communication around yourself instead of around the work and the people doing it.
Here’s what that costs you. Some people will never speak up in a meeting. Put the same question in an email, give them an hour, and they’ll come back with the sharpest answer on the team. Other people do their best thinking in dialogue. Bury them in email and they disconnect, and the tough conversations they could have solved in ten minutes get flattened into text that’s easy to misread.
If I were talking to a room of CEOs, I’d put it this way: know your people and adjust your approach. This isn’t about being soft or pandering to anyone. It’s about being more effective and efficient while getting the most out of people.
How EOS changed the way we meet at Omnia
One of my favorite things about running on EOS (the Entrepreneurial Operating System, a framework that helps companies set goals, stay accountable, and solve problems) is how much more efficient it has made us. Every week, our leadership team holds a structured “Level 10” meeting, and a big chunk of it is set aside for the IDS portion: Identify, Discuss, Solve. That’s our processing time.
Because everyone knows that time is coming, people think twice before firing off an email between meetings. If it can wait, it goes on the issues list. And more often than not, by the time we get to it, the email never needed to be sent at all. We have fewer meetings and less email, because the work has a reliable place to go.
You don’t have to run on EOS to borrow the idea. A predictable meeting rhythm, with real time built into the agenda to work through issues, takes pressure off both the calendar and the inbox.
When should you meet, and when should you send an email?
Send an email when you’re conveying information that’s concise, clear and doesn’t require dialogue. Meet when people need to work through disagreement, complexity, or intent.
If you’re rolling out a new policy or process, put it in writing. You need the documentation and the digital trail. But if people don’t agree on something, or they need to ask questions to understand the intent behind a decision, get them in a room or on a call.
I’ve had one rule for years: if an email thread goes past three replies and nothing is getting resolved, pick up the phone and talk to each other. More importantly, listen to each other. Dialogue is often the fastest way through.
Here’s a simple guide for the most common situations:
| The situation | Best approach | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Sharing a new policy or process | Email, with a Q&A option | You need documentation and a digital trail people refer back to. |
| Status update or FYI | Email or a shared tracker | Nobody needs to discuss it. They just need to know it. |
| An issue that can wait a few days | Add it to your weekly meeting agenda | Batching issues cuts interruptions and gives people time to think. |
| Disagreement or competing priorities | Meeting or phone call | People need to hear intent and ask questions, not guess at tone. |
| A complex problem with a lot of moving parts | Meeting, with a pre-read sent ahead | The pre-read gives reflective thinkers time to process before they walk in. |
| Tough feedback or sensitive news | Face to face or a live call, then a written follow-up | Tone matters. Text is easy to misread when emotions are involved. |
| An email thread past three replies with no resolution | Pick up the phone | The thread stopped working two replies ago. |
| Brainstorming | Short meeting, plus a window for written ideas after | Verbal processors get the room. Reflective thinkers get time to add their best ideas. |
How do you adjust your communication for how your people are wired?
Start by knowing how each person on your team processes information, then build both options into how you communicate. A few ways to do that:
- Send agendas and pre-reads ahead of time. Reflective thinkers come in ready to contribute instead of processing on the spot.
- Invite written input after the meeting. Some of your best ideas will show up in an email the next morning.
- Respect your high Column 4s. Give every meeting a clear purpose, end on time, and don’t invite people who don’t need to be there.
- Don’t hide your high Column 3 people-oriented team members behind email. They need dialogue to stay engaged and connected.
This is where an employee behavioral assessment earns its keep. When you can see how each person is naturally wired, and how your whole team balances out, you stop guessing. The same insight that shapes your meeting habits also makes every employee development assessment and coaching conversation more useful.
Checklist: Before you schedule a meeting or hit send
☐ What’s the goal here: to inform, to decide, or to resolve?
☐ Does this need a written record?
☐ Is there disagreement, or room for the message to be misread?
☐ Who’s involved, and how do they process information best?
☐ Can this wait for our next regular meeting?
☐ If I’m meeting, have I sent an agenda and anything people should read first?
☐ If I’m emailing, would a two-minute phone call be faster?
What's the ROI of getting meeting culture right?
When you match the approach to the situation and the people, you get time back for the work that moves the business. You hear from everyone, not just the loudest voice in the room, so your decisions get better. Fewer messages get misread, which means fewer fires to put out later.
And people notice when their time and their way of thinking are respected. That’s culture. Nobody lists meeting habits among their employee retention tools, but they belong on the list. People stay where they feel heard and where their day isn’t eaten up by work that didn’t need to happen.
So here’s my ask for Monday morning. Before you schedule your next meeting or send your next email, stop and ask which approach fits the situation and the people involved. It takes ten seconds, and it adds up fast.
If you want a clearer picture of how your team is wired to communicate, reach out to the Omnia team. We’d love to help. And if you want to see what 451 leaders told us about how they’re managing their people this year, download our 2026 Talent Trends report.
