Can You Keep Your Meeting to Five Minutes?

“It’s often shocking when people first come to Huge,” he says.

Media executive Jason Schlossberg, who loves to talk, was making a point in a meeting shortly after joining Huge as managing director last April when Mr. Shapiro cut in and told him he understood, and Mr. Schlossberg should move on. “I had four more anecdotes to prove that point!” Mr. Schlossberg says he thought at the time. Now, he says, “I choose my words more carefully.”

Mr. Shapiro stands at the forefront of a war on meeting bloat. Weary of long, inefficient meetings, some employers are squeezing minor decision-making sessions into a few minutes. Agile-management techniques embraced years ago by tech companies are bringing brief daily check-in meetings to marketing, e-commerce, advertising and other fields.

The move is shattering some workplace rites and routines: Long-winded monologues and PowerPoints are out. There’s no time for small talk, and less tolerance for 30- or 60-minute meetings when five to 15 minutes will do. Participants must learn to distill their ideas and requests to the conference-room equivalent of an elevator pitch.

Employees at Scrum50 start brief daily meetings right on time and finish some in as little as four to six minutes, says

Chris Parker,

managing partner of the South Norwalk, Conn., digital marketing agency. “If you’re five or six minutes late, you’ve missed it.”

Creative professionals used to making polished presentations must briefly explain mere seeds of ideas or works-in-progress instead, says Scrum50’s executive creative director,

Jennifer Miller.

“You sort of need to check your ego at the door,” she says.

Jamie Abbruscato

was cut short during a meeting shortly after joining LaneTerralever, a Phoenix digital agency, in 2015. “It feels like having the wind knocked out of you,” says Mr. Abbruscato, an account director. The agency has 25-employee teams meet every morning for rapid-fire updates on dozens of projects, says

David Foster,

chief operating officer.

People typically speak for 15 to 30 seconds at a time—or risk being cut off by meeting leaders. Now, Mr. Abbruscato spends five minutes before each meeting paring his customary three- to five-minute updates to 30 seconds, max. He carries notes with him to prod his memory, he says.

Many meeting leaders employ the three-bounce rule, says

Jack Skeels,

chief executive of AgencyAgile, Los Angeles, a management-training firm. After three back-and-forth exchanges between two participants, the topic is deferred to a separate meeting. Others impose a “so-that” imperative: Any update must include a description of the impact on others, as in, “I completed my work on that project so that Angela can take it to the client today,” Mr. Skeels says.

When product manager

Alexandra Roth

was drawn into a long exchange with a co-worker during a recent meeting at her employer, Fingerpaint Marketing,

Jennifer McKenna

hit play on music she has queued on her laptop: Nappy Roots’s “Good Day,” says Ms. McKenna, head of operations at the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., marketing agency. She likens it to music at the Oscars signaling that it’s time for winners to stop talking. Ms. Roth adds, “I was like, ‘OK, yeah, we’re done with this conversation.’ I was wasting seven other people’s time.”

Lindsey West,

chief executive of Track1099, a Redwood City, Calif., maker of tax-filing software, says there’s no time during her five-minute video meetings with employees to worry about her image or appearance. “That’s one of the beauties of five-minute meetings: They’re so fast nobody is really assessing how your hair looks,” Ms. West says.

Asking someone to coffee can seem just too long. Chief executive

Charlie Kim

sometimes holds five-minute sessions he jokingly calls “lightning meetings” among employees at 121Nexus, a Cambridge, Mass., software developer: A lightning meeting “has energy, it has action, people are shocked by it and everything about it truly moves,” Mr. Kim says.

When vendors ask to set 30 minutes for coffee, he gives them 10. “Thirty minutes is a lot. What are we going to achieve?” he says. He has little use for the “banter for the first five minutes: How are you doing? How are the kids?” he says. “To respect the other person’s time, maybe you need to get right to it,” he says. “We all drink way too much coffee already.”

If a meeting participant at Netamorphosis, a New York e-commerce company, drones on too long, chief executive

Lyde Spann

holds up a hand and says, “Nope, we’re not going to talk about that right now.” She later huddles with employees she silences to smooth over “what might be considered rude behavior,” Ms. Spann says.

“An adverse effect of this kind of efficiency,” she says, is that “meetings used to be a time to connect. You’d ask people how their weekend was. You build relationships. We run the risk of missing that.” She compensates by scheduling time off on Fridays for socializing, and check-ins every 30 days for employees to talk about how they’re feeling, “take a deep breath and get some reinforcement,” Ms. Spann says.

Write to Sue Shellenbarger at Sue.Shellenbarger@wsj.com