Meeting Makeover: Treating Your Meetings Like a Product

[00:00:01] You're listening to the HR Mixtape, a podcast for leaders who want to understand people, strengthen culture, and navigate change with clarity. Today's conversation starts now. Joining me today is Rebecca Hines, author and founder at Glean. Rebecca studies organizational behavior and the future of work with a sharp focus on collaboration and how teams use time.

[00:00:37] Rebecca, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Thank you so much for having me. So we are talking all things meetings today. And I keep thinking about this because I've had some really great conversations recently with people in the AI space and people in the engagement space. And a lot of them come back to that concept in, you know, a certain way here or there. So, you know, you've studied this concept around modern work for years.

[00:01:04] So what made meetings kind of the thing that you were like willing to go all in on? Well, it's interesting because so much of how we work and why we work and who we work with, you know, is powered by human psychology. And when we think about meetings in particular, meetings are unique in that they're a very visible form of work. When we think about most work in organizations, it's highly invisible, right?

[00:01:30] It's very hard to see someone thinking carefully or rewriting that email for the 10th, 11th, 12th time. But meetings are highly visible. And we know that as humans, we have a visibility bias. We associate what's visible with what's valuable. And because we can often see meetings on people's calendars, we can see people huddled around the conference room or leaning into their Zoom screen, right? We associate meetings with a status symbol.

[00:01:58] And we all feel it where we see someone's packed calendar and our first association is, wow, this person must be busy. They must be important. They must have high status within the organization. And you get into this rut where people start to think that meetings should happen to show work as opposed to actually move forward. There are a whole host of other reasons and drivers and biases. But I think at the heart of it, it's this visibility bias that is so difficult to disassociate.

[00:02:29] It's so true, that concept of when you jump on and you look at somebody's calendar to do a meeting and you're like, oh, my gosh, I can't meet with them for three weeks. Like they must be important, which is funny because in my way I handle my own calendar, I actually do a lot of calendar blocking. So it might be a little deceptive if somebody looks at my own calendar. You know, though, it's interesting. You talk about something called meeting junk drawers.

[00:02:55] So I'd love if you could tell us a little bit more about that and, you know, how that's hiding in organizations. Sure. And I think it's very much related to the visibility bias because meetings feel like a status symbol. They feel like a way to move work forward, regardless of whether we actually do anything meaningful in the meeting. We start to use meetings as the knee jerk reaction for everything. Right. We have a problem. We schedule a meeting. We need alignment. We schedule a meeting.

[00:03:23] We have a status update we want to share. You know, sometimes we want to hear our own voice in a large group. And meetings become the junk drawer. Right. They become the thing that we can use to perceivably do anything, accomplish anything, information exchange, alignment, decision making, building culture. When we need to recognize that meetings are also the most expensive form of collaboration in our organization.

[00:03:50] Right. There's no other form of collaboration that requires synchronous, real time, back and forth collaboration, communication, coordination. And because of that, you know, we over index on meetings when really they should be the last resort, a very important, essential last resort, but not the default knee jerk reaction. I am sure those listening have done that exercise that I have where you're sitting in a meeting and you look around the room because you sit in HR.

[00:04:17] You kind of have a good sense of people's salaries and you're like, oh, this is a $10,000, you know, 30 minute meeting that should have been an email that that we just were very aware of that. You have this idea about changing our mindset around meetings to think about them as products. What does that mean in practice? It means several different things. And this is the premise of your best meeting ever is we need to treat meetings like a product.

[00:04:44] Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They're where decisions get made, alignment gets set, culture gets built or broken. And yet they're also the least optimized because we use them as a junk drawer and various other reasons. And so if we are going to treat meetings like a product, well, we should apply the same product design principles that we know make great everyday products great. And so that that ranges, you know, the first principle in the book is around meeting debt.

[00:05:13] Just as we have technical debt in our products, we have meeting debt. We have legacy meetings that pile up on our calendar where we often feel the sense of guilt and fear associated with canceling them. So sometimes wiping the slate clean is the best way to reset your calendar all the way to user centric design. Right. Often we design meetings for ourselves as the organizer or for the most powerful person in the room.

[00:05:41] Just as we design products for the user, we need to be designing meetings for the user. And those are the attendees at large within the meeting and then technology as well. So thinking about just as great products are built through continuous innovation, continuous improvement, the same should be true with our meetings.

[00:06:00] The fact that our meetings look largely the same as they did two, three, four decades ago, right, is a sign that we don't apply intentional iteration and innovation to our meetings. How do we ask ourselves the right questions so that we can design the meeting correctly? And often it's asking the attendees the right question because we do tend to design meetings for ourselves.

[00:06:26] One of my favorite tips and strategies is to measure after about 10 percent of the meetings you run, what's sometimes called and my good colleague, Elise Keith, calls return on time investment. It's simple zero to five scale asking your attendees, was this worth the time you invested? Now, that does a couple of things. One, we know that humans suffer from what I sometimes call the meeting suck reflex, right?

[00:06:53] There's so much evidence that we are socially conditioned to believe meetings are bad. And that's why when you ask people to rate their meetings publicly, they tend to do so more negatively than if you ask them to rate the same meetings in private because we think we should hate meetings. And we have this visceral negative reaction. So that's why you can't go into an organization. You can't go into your own organization and ask employees how effective are meetings? Or do you enjoy meetings in the organization?

[00:07:21] Because you get the reflex and not the reality. If you anchor on time, it's not perfect, but everyone has an intuitive sense of the value of their time. And they have an intuitive sense of whether this meeting was worth the time they invested. Often you'll get split ratings. So you'll see half the group. Yeah, this was a pretty productive, valuable meeting. Half the group didn't need to be there.

[00:07:45] And it helps you at least start to apply a more evidence-backed, data-driven approach to designing these meetings. As you go through that process, how do you end up with your list of meetings that you're like, hey, we got to kill this one. We got to shorten it. We got to turn it asynchronously. And I'm going to add a caveat to that because often we are still working within the constraints of maybe working with a C-suite leader who expects a certain thing to happen.

[00:08:13] So those could be competing priorities. Yes. And this is why leadership, you know, almost every recommendation I give to an organization, the first question is, you know, what is the culture? And does leadership have a vested interest in improving meetings? Because you can fix things either way, you know, at least in part.

[00:08:33] But if leadership is on board, you're able to have so much more liberty to make some bold changes and do the sort of calendar cleanses, restart from scratch much easier. If you don't have that, you have to sort of tinker at the edges and it can still be effective, but it's a much longer process and tends to be a lot less sustainable.

[00:08:56] What's exciting is increasingly I'm using AI with organizations to make this determination because AI is not objective, but it has that perceivable objective feeling where if you see something, if you see a recommendation from AI, if it's not hallucinating and if it's backed by data and evidence, it can give you much more ammunition when you go to the C-suite.

[00:09:21] So I'll often work with organizations these days to build meeting calculators that take into account various different outputs. So if an AI knows enough about your organization, well, it can help you make that determination. You know, do we see that what's being said in the meeting is also being said in other channels, in Slack and email? Well, maybe that meeting can be moved asynchronous because we have the muscles that are already transmitting that information.

[00:09:48] Or if we see that the executive is dominating 70 or 80 percent of the airtime, well, maybe that's an indication that this can be a video update to the team as opposed to a live synchronous meeting. And, you know, executives, the C-suite, especially when they're under more and more pressure to use this technology and to use it to drive real results and not just symbolic use,

[00:10:11] they tend to be for sure more than I've ever seen in my career, more receptive to, hey, the AI has given me this recommendation. I can start to see how it might play out in practice and why it might be valuable to rethink some of these meeting practices. I love the anchoring in an ROI or a metric. How do you get around some of maybe the bureaucracy that potentially we could step into? Maybe even if you don't have AI, right?

[00:10:39] If you have somebody who has to kind of sit in the meeting and kind of mentally do that mental math with some of the examples you gave, how do we help make sure that egos don't get, you know, in the way of doing this work? It's hard. And I've learned this piece in particular is hard. The more you can make it objective, the more you can make it research-backed. We have overwhelming evidence, for example, that equal airtime is one of the strongest predictors of team performance.

[00:11:03] And so if you're going to executives with that lens of this is why this matters, you know, you might think you have a lot to say in the meeting, but actually we know that the meeting is going to be much more productive if we have all voices heard or if we remove the voices who are not contributing. I've learned the single most effective way to do this as well is to anchor whatever you're measuring in what the most powerful person cares about most, even if you're looking at a broader swath of metrics.

[00:11:32] So, you know, if you're working with a sales leader, anchor on customer satisfaction. And the more you can, you know, tie what's happening in the meeting to customer satisfaction, customer outputs. If you're an engineering leader, right, the amount of focus time the engineers have, sometimes the number of lines of code written, right, it's never going to be perfect. But the more you can communicate that, hey, you understand that meetings do drive value and drive value for specific groups.

[00:12:02] Let's have a sense of how much positive or negative impact these meetings are driving for what matters most. That tends to get more buy-in from executive and powerful type people. That's a conversation that keeps coming up when I'm talking to people about metrics, is moving away from kind of this like generic view of metrics and getting really specific to not just your organization, but the intent of the thing.

[00:12:29] So I love that you brought that up because every meeting and every group could be different. Yes, exactly. And we're seeing this with AI, I think, more than we've ever seen before. There's no AI metric that is going to do a service to you if you look across, you know, every single employee because this technology is so malleable just as meetings are so malleable. And that's why there's not one right answer in terms of you should be spending eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours a week in meetings, 20 hours, right?

[00:12:58] The more we can understand the nuances of the team, the KPIs that matter to them, the more effective the metric is going to be and the more of a sense of ownership and accountability people are going to feel. Yeah. Yeah. For those who have listened to the podcast for a while, they know that psychological safety is super important to me. And so any chance I get to ask somebody about how that is applied in their specific expertise, I always do.

[00:13:26] So you've mentioned a couple of things about making sure that you are paying attention to who's in the room and communication styles and those kinds of things. But what are some best practices to build psychological safety? And I'll take it from the perspective of, hey, new meeting, maybe new group of people, new team, that kind of stuff. How do you start right to create the right environment while using some of the tools you already talked about, but really leaning into how do we build this as a safe space to have the conversations we need to have? It's so important.

[00:13:55] And this is one of the biggest dimensions I see make a difference in terms of can we fix our meetings? And how empowered do people who might be lower down in New York chart or in the status hierarchy feel to push back on bad meetings? In the best cases, you have a culture of psychological safety where everyone feels empowered to raise their hand when they see meeting dysfunction,

[00:14:21] both before, after and during the meeting. Unfortunately, that's not the case. And I think, you know, I've done a lot of research through the years on status dynamics in organizations. And this is where, you know, we see status dynamics pervasively show up because there are so many different dimensions of power and status in meetings. When we think about vertically through the org chart, understanding, you know, how many executives are in the room versus individual contributors.

[00:14:49] Individual contributors in all likelihood are on average going to feel less psychologically safe to contribute and speak up. Gender is a big one and something I've done a lot of research on as well. How do you ensure that women feel empowered to speak up? You know, how do you call out the behavior of, you know, men taking credit for women's ideas or women speaking less than men, men interrupting women? You know, we have so much evidence that this plays out time and time again in meetings.

[00:15:18] Another big one is the remote hybrid in-person dimension. And we know that in-person participants have higher status within the organization by default, right? They're together in the room. They have that visibility bias. They have the proximity bias. And so the more you can, I often refer to it as shifting the center of gravity to the remote folks, inviting them to speak first, giving them some physical proxy within the room, right? The more they feel part of the conversation.

[00:15:48] And this obviously goes beyond psychological safety, but it has a lot to do with psychological safety in the sense of if people feel like they're brought into the conversation and that their ideas, and in particular, their ideas around improving the meeting are accepted and heard, they're going to be much more likely to be a co-designer in not only the meeting, but also better meeting culture in general. Yeah.

[00:16:17] The meeting dysfunction term, I absolutely love that. What is some language that you've helped organizations adopt so that they can bring up that meeting dysfunction and they have some of that shared language? So it comes across a little bit different when you have, you know, similar language that you can bring your concerns up with. Yes. Yes. And I think this is highly dependent on the organization, too. You know, there are lots of terms in the book. I think terms are important and acronyms are important, too.

[00:16:45] I have a lot of, you know, acronyms in the book. I think when it comes to meetings, the more you can jolt people out of the status quo, the more they start to get out of routine business as usual. And that's why, you know, I call the calendar cleanse meeting doomsday because it evokes this sense of, wow, meetings are a collective enemy to our time and to our focus. And we're not blaming the person who ran the bad meeting.

[00:17:14] We're collectively rallying around this idea of a meeting doomsday. I talk a lot about meeting minimalism and looking at the dimensions of meetings. So not just looking at meetings are dysfunctional at large, but how can we take the core dimensions of a meeting, the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, and think very carefully about each one. Because meetings are rarely broken, dysfunctional, wholesale. They're usually broken in terms of specific components, thinking about asynchronous, synchronous.

[00:17:43] I have a lot of rules around, you know, for example, only invite stakeholders, not spectators. And that type of language I think gives people, I've often seen the law of two feet as well being used. You know, if you're not contributing value or getting value from a meeting, use your two feet or however you're able and move out of the room.

[00:18:04] Those types of language, if it's shared, and in particular, if the executives are using it as well and baking it into meeting hygiene, people feel a sense of, wow, this is safe. You know, I have something concrete, whether it's a rule or acronym or term or phrase to push back on bad meetings with, as opposed to just something that feels very personal and individualized.

[00:18:28] And it makes me think of organizations that have moved away from PowerPoint presentation in meetings to you need to create a Word document or a brief. That concept really pushes the end user, whoever that is, you know, to really think about the content that they're putting together and what they're expecting out of a meeting. So I love organizations that have made that switch.

[00:18:52] What are some of those things that you've helped leaders to understand that, hey, if you still have to have the meeting, how do you switch it up in a way that your meeting then becomes productive instead of maybe just a, you know, a report out? Yes. And often it's the design of the meeting. You know, often it's that we haven't done enough work. We haven't put enough effort into designing the meeting to be effective. That's the root cause of so much of the dysfunction.

[00:19:20] It's not that the meeting doesn't deserve to exist, but it probably doesn't deserve to exist right now when you haven't done enough preparation or you're trying to use the meeting as the junk drawer for everything that needs to be communicated. So moving towards asynchronous communication channels, thinking about your communication system at large.

[00:19:41] You know, one of the simplest things and most important things organizations can do is give employees clarity in terms of what deserves to be a meeting, what deserves to be an email, what deserves to be Slack, and how do we use these channels? You know, when do we use at all mentions in Slack? When do we use direct messages? How do we enact these technologies to in practice?

[00:20:04] Because as we've spoken about, if you don't have that lay of the land and have it documented for employees, they're going to default to the meetings over the other communication channels because they start to feel like the most reliable way to move work forward. And you have this visibility bias kick in as well. Having a document that outlines what tools to use to communicate what is a huge takeaway.

[00:20:30] If you've not done that in your organization, it has solved. I've used it in organizations. It solves so many problems right away because it brings that clarity to, oh, hey, this is how I'm using this to communicate. And that you're not waiting on somebody to do something because you've used the wrong communication method. So I love that you brought that up. You know, as we wrap up our conversation, what is the one thing you want those listening and leaders to walk away with today?

[00:20:57] One thing they can change this week to improve their meetings and start to make a step in the right direction? It's intentionality. You know, none of this is, none of this, you know, encompasses things that we as humans within organizations can't do today. Right. It's as simple as taking that five minutes, 10 minutes before a meeting and thinking intentionally about, okay, have we designed this meeting for the attendees? I do often like to think about those four dimensions.

[00:21:27] So the length, the cadence, the attendees and the agenda items. And even if you're not ready to do that meeting doomsday, the full calendar cleanse, everyone can look at a meeting that they know isn't optimized and pick one of those four dimensions and think about, okay, how do I make a small tweak today? How do I move? I talk in the book about 27 minute meetings, right? That shift from 30 minute meetings to 27 minute meetings will jolt people out of the status quo. They'll start to take the time more seriously.

[00:21:56] They'll start to take the meeting more seriously. And you'll have a productive conversation around, wow, you know, what is the desired length of this meeting? We didn't need 30 minutes. We know that meetings suffer from Parkinson's law. Work expands to fill the time allotted. If we give a meeting 30 minutes, it's going to take 30 minutes. And so those small changes, you know, I think are underappreciated in terms of how much they do in aggregate to jolt people out of this, you know, status quo around bad meetings as business as usual.

[00:22:26] Rebecca, what a great conversation. So many great takeaways. For those listening, make sure you check out the show notes. I will have a link to Rebecca's book there so you can check that out. Thanks so much for jumping on the podcast with me. Thank you so much for having me. That was a lot of fun. Thanks for tuning in to the HR Mixtape.

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