How to Make Meetings Less Terrible

How to Make Meetings Less Terrible (Ep. 389) - Freakonomics Freakonomics

"Steven ROGELBERG: The best estimates suggest that there are around 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. alone. Most professionals attend approximately 15 meetings a week. And as you move up the organizational hierarchy, individuals spend more and more time in meetings. And it’s not a surprise to find executives spending anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of their time in meetings.

DUBNER: So does that fact mean that the people who end up running companies or institutions are basically the people who are good at meetings?

ROGELBERG: Oh, I wish that was the case. But, no, that does not appear to be the case. Some of the research I do looks at satisfaction with a meeting. And if you survey people immediately after a meeting, one person is invariably more positive than everyone else. And this one person is the meeting leader. The person who’s leading the meeting says, “Hey, this is really good.” And why wouldn’t they feel that? They’re controlling the whole experience. They’re talking the most. They’re like, “Hey this is nirvana.” But everyone else is reporting much more negative experiences...

“Too many meetings” has been identified consistently as the number-one source of frustration at work, the number-one time-waster at work — you know, research has shown that around 70, 71 percent of senior managers view meetings as unproductive. Now this is jarring, because senior managers are the ones calling the most meetings. So if senior managers are calling them unproductive, we know we have a problem. Bad meetings have just been accepted as a cost of doing business. I give these speeches to senior H.R. leaders and talent leaders across the Fortune 100 companies, and I ask them, “How many of you have any content on your employee-engagement surveys that covers the topic of meetings?” Do you want to guess how many people raise their hands?

DUBNER: Two percent.

ROGELBERG: Hey, that’s a really good guess. Yes — that’s right...

SCHWARTZMAN: I would say that meetings are the organization. Which is to say that instead of having the meeting as a place to solve problems, we need to have problems and crises and decisions to produce meetings.

Jen SANDLER: We actually have vastly superior technologies to do exactly the things that people say go on in meetings... So the question of why we continue to meet becomes really important. So one answer to that is that we don’t need to. And the other answer is that that’s not what meetings are for. That might be what we tell ourselves that they are for. And most of us have this experience too, where we go into a meeting that is ostensibly to make a decision, but it’s clear that that decision has been made prior to the meeting. And then we might ask as participants in that meeting, why are we even meeting then? We’re meeting maybe to legitimize that decision or for somebody to say that that was a collective decision even though it wasn’t...

Michael CONKLIN: After coming back from a short vacation, my boss came into my office frantically and said, “You just missed three meetings in the last two days.” And I said, “Oh my gosh, I must have missed so much. Tell me all these things that have changed.” And the boss froze and said, “Well, nothing really changed. Just keep up the good work.” I figured that was a pretty good indication those meetings did not need to take place...

ROGELBERG: Magically, the average length across the world is one hour. And there’s just there’s no reason for that. This is a modern phenomenon that has emerged due to calendaring programs like Outlook and Google Calendar... Parkinson’s Law is this idea that work expands to whatever time is allotted to it. So if you schedule an hour, it’s going to take an hour. But if you schedule 48 minutes, it’s gonna take 48 minutes...

Chad WIEBE: So my boss at the time said, “Let’s have a four-hour long meeting,” which is excruciating. So at the end of this planning meeting we had half an hour still to fill. I put my hand up and I said, “You know what, I think it would be really appreciated if we just cut everybody loose a half hour early, let everyone get back to the office a little bit earlier.” And I was met with silence for about 10, 15 seconds before one of my other middle managers piped up and said, “You know what? I just brought in a client who’s a magician.” And so, we hired a magician. For half an hour. It was unbelievable...

ROGELBERG: Psychological research shows that when you add a little bit of pressure, it creates more focus on optimal performance. So if this results in you starting your meeting at 1:12 p.m. and ending at 1:50, so be it. You are in control. Make choices.

PARKER: We go into autopilot and we follow specific scripts and we don’t actually think about asking the first question of all meetings, which is, “What is the purpose of this meeting?”...

ROGELBERG: If a leader truly recognizes that they are inherently a steward of others’ time, they do meetings differently. They think carefully about what the meetings should cover. They think carefully about how that meeting should be facilitated. And we do this all the time when it comes to meetings we have with customers. When we meet with a customer, we think about that in advance. But when it comes to employee meetings, we just dial it in. We rely on habits. And a great example is the research shows that 50 percent of agendas are recycled. We would never do that with customers.

PARKER: My biggest piece of advice is, if you’re going to get people together in person, when time is limited and resources are limited, gather around the things that you can’t figure out over email.

ROGELBERG: So when you are thinking about your agenda, consider framing it not as topics to be discussed, but consider framing it as questions to be answered. By framing it as questions to be answered it’s easier to determine who needs to be there because they’re relevant to the questions... Meetings are getting larger and larger and larger. And this phenomenon is not happening out of bad intentions. Typically we just don’t want to exclude anyone. And at the same time, technology makes it so easy for us to just hijack someone’s calendar. And the research shows that larger meetings are just filled with additional dysfunction.

While people generally complain about having a meeting, they complain just as much if they are not invited to a meeting. Given this reality, there’s a couple of things that we can do. So first of all, we can actually design the agenda such that part of the agenda is relevant to a large group of individuals, and then part of it is relevant to a smaller section of that. So a big group attends for part of the meeting and then people leave... If you go to those secondary individuals and you tell them, “Hey, I’m having a meeting. Here are the topics we’re going to talk about. If you have any input on these topics, please feel free to email me. I will also show you the minutes of the meeting. And at any point down the road you want to go to future meetings you’re more than welcome.” And people really appreciate being given arguably, the best gift in the world right now. Which is time... Meeting Recovery Syndrome. What we find is that when people have bad meetings, they don’t necessarily just leave it at the door. It sticks with them. They ruminate, they co-ruminate, and they even report it negatively affecting their productivity after the meeting...

PARKER: She started her meetings by saying, let’s everybody do a rose and a thorn, which is sort of this old exercise of like, what’s the best part of your week, what’s the worst part of your week. And that’s just the first 10 minutes, the rest of the 50 minutes was used for “business.” And she called me up and she said, my meetings have transformed. And I said, why? And she said, well first, our team has changed over time because the risks people take vary week to week — some people share silly stuff. Some people share deep stuff. Some people share stuff from work, some people share stuff from over the weekend. It’s actually changed what’s allowable in the conversation.She’s like, but the second thing that has been most interesting is, I didn’t realize this, but people have started to say more real stuff in the context of work, because by starting the meeting with including a thorn as the base default, I didn’t realize I was playing a role as cheerleader, and they didn’t think that I could handle or wanted to have 50-50 thorns. It’s changed the norms of what’s acceptable and what we talk about for the rest of the meeting.

DUBNER: So Priya, you write that businesses tend to “run on a cult of positivity.” What do you mean by that, and how do you counter it?

PARKER: Whether it is panels that are asking guests to talk about all of their successes or launch a product, or whether it is a meeting in which you’re talking about how wonderful or how great things are. And so part of the unwinding of the cult of positivity is to go back and ask, what is the purpose of this gathering? And often, positivity prevents progress...

We want conflict in meetings. What we don’t want is personal conflict, but we want conflict around ideas. So if you have a group going to battle with incredible passion around ideas — that is a fantastic meeting. Especially if it’s a safe environment and people go “Wow, that was amazing that we could have this level of disagreement. But in a way that does not castrate everyone in the room.”... part of the unwinding of the cult of positivity is to go back and ask, what is the purpose of this gathering? And often, positivity prevents progress...

ROGELBERG: So if I’m a meeting leader, I can do different things. Instead of asking people to prepare in advance, you allocate the very first part of the meeting to reading the preparatory materials because at that point at least you know everyone has done it. And then there’s other unconventional tools. Even if I have a large group of folks, and I want them to engage strongly on a topic, if I have people pair up and work in dyads, even just for a few minutes, and then come back together as a group, me having folks work in dyad changes the whole dynamic of the large group discussion. The level of communication and passion will be much higher. But what we know from the research is that left to just the standard protocols of people talking, that a decision better than what would have just been produced by the best individual in the room only occurs 20 percent of the time. So, most typically, meeting performance is just not optimal...

PARKER: Most human connection and gatherings suffer more from unhealthy peace than from unhealthy conflict...

John COSGROVE: About seven years ago I started a company ironically in the meetings-and-events industry. And in the last seven years we have not had a single meeting, and our company seems to be running very successfully.

Indeed, the reputation of meetings is so poor that many people simply avoid holding them — Mark Cuban and Elon Musk, for instance. Some companies have instituted “no-meeting” days, to give employees a chance to do their work without being dragged off to the conference room. But still: 55 million meetings a day in the U.S. — that’s the reality. Steven Rogelberg has found some other small measures to alleviate the pain. Snacks (of course). Getting people to switch out of their usual seats. Using anonymous surveys so people can raise objections without fear of reprisal. The research shows that just asking attendees to rate a meeting raises the quality of meetings at that firm. And what about when people sit through meetings staring at their phones?...

ROGELBERG: Multitasking as a coping mechanism. When an employee walks into a meeting they are relinquishing control. And so how can you get that control back? Well, you can daydream. You can make lists. Or you can multitask. That’s how you can reclaim your power. So one of the techniques is trying to build a break in the middle of a meeting. So if I tell them, “Hey, I promise you in 30 minutes you can check your phone,” that’s going to help put their minds at ease."