In my experience at least, it's never been that anyone can truly unilaterally schedule a meeting. Instead, it's that anyone can propose a meeting with anyone el

In my experience at least, it's never been that anyone can truly unilaterally schedule a meeting. Instead, it's that anyone can propose a meeting with anyone else at any time, which people end up feeling obligated to accept for a variety of social and political reasons. I agree that there is a common tendency for folks to schedule more meetings than would be most efficient, and that there are a variety of reasons why this is the case. I’m not so sure that having every employee in to set office hours outside of which no one else may invite them to a meeting is the correct solution. I could imagine it being fairly likely that you might end up in a scenario in which this system makes it impossible to schedule meetings with many groups of people. Meeting time is expensive for both individuals and the company, but some amount of meetings can be worthwhile! Ideally both inviters and invitees attempt to consider as many of the trade-offs involved as possible, and are able to do all of send, receive, accept, and reject, and propose alternatives to invitations as needed.