Focus Is the New KPI: Why Too Many Meetings Hurt Team Productivity

As a company with over 130 remote team members working async across 28 countries, we believe focus is becoming the KPI that matters most. Meetings are eating it alive, calendars look like confetti, and teams feel busy without feeling productive.

We hosted a webinar to dig into why that’s happening and what to do about it. Joining us were Jared Brown, CEO and co-founder of Hubstaff, and Noa Arlosoroff, Chief of Staff to the CEO at Deel, a fully remote company that’s grown from 1,500 to over 7,000 employees during her three and a half years there.

You can watch the full recording below or read on for the key takeaways.

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What the benchmark data shows

The discussion drew on our 2026 global work trends & benchmark data from 140,000 team members across 17,000 organizations. A few key numbers from our data:

• Deep focus averages 39% of the day. That works out to roughly two to three hours of real focus time.
• Hybrid teams get the least focus time. Hybrid workers average 31%, compared to 41% for remote teams and 45% for in-office teams.
• Meetings cluster in prime focus hours. Roughly 30% of meetings land between 9 and 11 a.m., often the most productive window of the day.
• Nearly a third of meetings happen outside 9 to 6. For global teams, that’s often a sign of time zone collaboration rather than a broken culture. More on that below.

When we polled attendees on what’s stealing their team’s attention, tool overload and meetings led the pack.

Where focus actually goes

Jared’s take on the numbers: focus time is lower than he expected, and the culprit is familiar. “We have taken some of the baggage from the office and brought it to the home environment,” he said.

Working from home used to feel like a superpower. Headphones on, five hours of heads-down work, more output than a full day at the office.

Now Slack pings every few minutes, calls get scheduled because scheduling is frictionless, and the old office distractions have been recreated at home.

Noa sees a similar pattern at Deel. The feeling of “too much work, not enough people” often isn’t about actual workload.

Constant messages across Slack, email, and WhatsApp make people feel overwhelmed, especially at hypergrowth companies where opportunities are everywhere.

Her answer is alignment. When everyone knows their KPIs, what they’re expected to achieve, and what they’ll be evaluated on, the workload usually turns out to be achievable.

3 rules to stop meeting creep

Jared shared three practices any team can take back and apply:

• Make managers makers. Everyone, including the CEO, should spend part of their day doing individual contributor work. Managers are the ones who pull makers into the manager schedule, and it’s hard to say no to the boss. When managers protect their own maker time (Jared suggests around 20% of the schedule), they stop treating everyone else’s focus time as free.
• Put a cost on meetings. Every meeting needs an agenda and a goal in the description, visible to all attendees ahead of time. If the goal isn’t clear yet, that conversation belongs in an async channel, not a calendar invite.
• Use async video and documentation as a superpower. A five-minute recorded video can replace a 30-minute meeting. It’s reusable, shareable, and watched on the recipient’s schedule instead of interrupting theirs. Hubstaff has worked this way since the early days, and it lives on today in a dedicated show-and-tell Slack channel.

Noa said she’d copy and paste all three at Deel’s scale, then added a few rules of her own:

• The meeting is the exception, not the default. Every meeting has to justify itself with an agenda, action items, and follow-up.
• Skip the standing weekly. Deel’s default is to solve things as they come up, on a quick call or Slack huddle, rather than collecting topics for a weekly sit-down. It cuts meetings and speeds up execution.
• Let AI handle the alignment updates. Deel opens a Slack channel for nearly everything, and with Claude connected to Slack, Noa can ask for a summary of everything that happened in a channel over the past week. That replaces a whole category of update meetings.

Leadership sets the tone here. Deel’s leadership avoids presentation-style meetings entirely. Anything that can be a video becomes a video, and meetings (and even offsites) are reserved for discussion and working sessions.

Asked for the one sentence they’d put in a team agreement, Jared offered “we value and prioritize action over discussion.” Noa went with two: the meeting is the exception, not the default, and you own the result.

Flexible without being always on

Around 30% of meetings happen outside 9 to 6, but for global teams that often reflects a new normal of time zone collaboration and customer coverage. The risk is when late nights stop being optional and start being expected.

Deel handles this with a clear definition of urgency. A customer escalation is urgent. A weeks-long project is not, and nobody is expected to respond to it during off hours.

A few structural habits back this up:

• Company ceremonies run twice. The weekly all-hands happens in two time zone windows, one for APAC and one for EMEA, so everyone can pick the slot that fits.
• A global calendar shows everyone’s holidays. It covers holidays across countries and religions, syncs into Slack, and shows when someone is out, so you can decide whether a question really can’t wait.

Jared described how Hubstaff keeps flexibility sustainable:

• Consistency over extremes. Work roughly eight hours a day, five days a week, on whatever schedule fits your life. Consistent schedules create the overlap teams need for real-time collaboration.
• Weekends are for resetting. Hubstaff actively discourages catching up on weekends. Clear boundaries between work and life keep remote work a marathon, not a sprint.
• Respect the schedules you can see. Know your teammates’ working hours and don’t book a call at 10 p.m. their time unless it’s a genuine emergency. Jared calls that a blue moon event, maybe once a year.
• Don’t time shift too far. Asking someone in Europe to regularly work until 7:30 p.m. means taking dinner and family time. Hubstaff wants people working within their natural time zone.

Taming tool sprawl and the toggle tax

Our data shows workers touch about 18 apps a day, climbing to 36 in some SEO roles. The number itself isn’t the problem. The problem starts when the stack grows without structure and every update means asking where the current version of the truth lives.

Jared’s first-30-days playbook for a messy stack:

• Set up clear document storage. A simple folder taxonomy in Google Workspace or Office 365 means people can find documents without Slacking a colleague for the link.
• Consolidate on one project management tool per department. Tasks duplicated across systems create confusion and parallel work. Different departments can choose different tools, but each should have exactly one.
• Run a full tool audit. Look for overlap, ask whether a module in an existing tool covers what a separate tool is doing, and bring the count down.

Just as important is what he wouldn’t touch in those first 30 days: the reporting metrics and KPIs. Get the house in order first, then talk about changing outcomes.

Deel prevents sprawl at the front door with a strict procurement path. Every new tool starts with a business case signed off by the department head, then clears compliance and legal review, and then a budget-versus-ROI check.

A dedicated go-to-market processes and systems role evaluates whether an existing tool in the stack could do the job instead, since Deel defaults to expanding existing contracts over adding new ones.

Access is just as controlled. Tools are granted only to the roles that need them, requests route through an internal app for manager and procurement approval, and unused seats are revoked after 30 or 90 days of inactivity.

Making AI a company capability instead of a personal hack

Most teams treat AI as a personal productivity trick. Both companies argued that the bigger wins come from applying it at the department level.

Jared shared three areas where AI has changed how Hubstaff operates:

• Customer support. A live chatbot trained on thousands of tier-one questions now handles 82% of those requests without escalating to a person, with high customer satisfaction. AI also drafts support emails that reps review and refine, covering at least half of what used to be written from scratch.
• Engineering. AI reviews pull requests and acts as a coding copilot, and both keep improving as models and context windows grow.
• Sales. Reps get an AI-generated prospect brief right before each call: what the company does, likely pain points, size, and industry.

Noa’s favorite recent example at Deel is expense management. Workers submit expenses through Deel, everything from mileage in Singapore to a meal in Zimbabwe, and AI now handles over 90% of the compliance checking with fewer mistakes than manual review.

Deel also made three moves to turn scattered experimentation into a global operating capability:

• One AI tool for everyone. Deel embedded its internal AI assistant, Alicia, into Claude’s desktop app, combining Alicia’s company knowledge with Claude’s reasoning and connectors to Google Drive, Gong, Zendesk, and Slack.
• A shared MCP layer. Every product team is required to expose its API to a single Model Context Protocol layer, so any AI agent built anywhere in the company can use every team’s capabilities.
• KPIs that require AI. Deel sets targets aggressive enough that they can’t be hit without AI, runs hackathons to build proficiency, and even tracks AI usage itself as a KPI.

Jared’s framing for keeping AI efforts focused: AI-led KPI improvements. Start from what the team needs to achieve, then find where AI creates a measurable improvement toward it, rather than starting from the tool and hunting for uses.

Ready to protect your team’s focus?

The session closed on three takeaways: 

1. Flexibility works when it comes with boundaries
2. Sustainable pace beats sprinting
3. Focus and AI are both non-negotiable now

Want to learn more? Check out our 2026 Global Trends and Benchmarks Report, along with bonus PDFs covering team-level benchmarks and a global time zone overlap playbook.