We All Hate Meetings—Here’s How to Make Them Work

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0:59Paul English:I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

1:10Paul English:All right, Alison, today's topic is one that every single listener is sure to have strong views about, and that is meetings. So, Alison, what do you generally think about work meetings? I try to avoid them at all costs. Thought you'd say that, and why? What do you hate most about meetings? I think that in most meetings, people spend a lot of time talking rather than deciding or doing. And as someone who really likes to get things done, I think they're a productivity waster. You're not alone in that. The numbers should alarm you. All right. People spend about 30 percent of their work time in meetings.

1:47Paul English:And in surveys generally say that half of their meetings are bad. So if you do the math, six hours of bad meetings a week, average U.S. salary$30 an hour, cost of money. Anyway, it works out to about$870 billion in the U.S. wasted in pointless meetings. That's about 6 % of the U.S. GDP. Oof. I am glad that you did the math instead of asking me to do it. But that is really astonishing. It's astonishing. But we're here today not just to carp about the negative. We do that all day on meetings, but to talk about how to do meetings well and so well that it's a competitive advantage for your company.

2:26Paul English:So my guest is Paul English, who was the co-founder of Kayak, who has thought a lot and who has talked to a lot of fellow CEOs about how to create a productive meeting culture. He's the author of the meeting book, How the Best Companies Meet Better. Here's our conversation. so you're writing about something that everybody feels very personal about feels very deeply about meetings and you know you start with why meetings can really suck the energy out of a company and so i want to start there why are meetings so bad why do we do this so badly i think people are unprepared to run meetings you know most companies i've worked out when i think about myself as a young manager decades ago, no one ever trained me how to run a meeting.

3:15They just don't take it serious enough, which is crazy because you think about how much time people spend in meetings, you'd want to be best in class at it.

3:23Paul English:So what, to the extent that it can be analyzed and quantified, what is the cost of all of these bad meetings that we're having? So we did a survey of a thousand people on LinkedIn, over 50 % of the people believed that over 50 % of the meetings were a complete waste of time. Now, if you have a thousand person company, you take the average white collar salary in the US, it's just under$10 million a year of staff time sitting in the bad meetings. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is not just the salaries of the people sitting in the room. I've heard of people who've had like a timer showing dollar bills flying by.

4:02So, you know, and that's good. But the problem is worse than that because it demoralizes people. I actually spoke to a reporter recently and he told me at his institution, which I will not name, he said, every time he gets a meeting invite and they say there's free pizza provided, he groans and he says, my God, if they have to bribe him with pizza, this is going to be a horrible meeting. Yeah, I mean, I think about my work, and there are times when I feel like, okay, if I could just get out of these meetings that I don't like and not be under this avalanche of email, I can get back to my job.

4:37Paul English:But then I wonder, what is my job? I mean, is our job just doing email and having meetings? It depends what your job is. I mean, I run, my career is, I'm an engineer, but my career is running design teams. And so we actually have to draw pretty pictures and write software. but it does seem like over time, particularly in management, that on my worst days, my calendar runs my life. On my best days, I have time to think and write and design. But I also do things like I color code my calendar and I analyze, I've been doing this for 20 years. Every Monday, Friday, I look at my calendar two weeks in advance with my assistant.

5:13And I look at things like what percent of my meetings were initiated by me, as opposed to I'm doing someone a favor by sitting in their meeting. And a bad day is you have eight meetings in a row where you're doing people favors. And it's good to do people favors, right? I mean, don't get me wrong. You want to help people out a little bit. But if you don't get your own agenda done and your own agenda can only be done at night when you put the kids to bed or on the weekends, that's not a very good work scenario.

5:39Paul English:So I'm guessing that everyone who's listening to this has their own frustration with meetings. But beyond that, at their companies has tried to attack this in some way, like no meeting Fridays, no meetings without agendas, you know, stand-up meetings. But they always come back. You know, what is it about the tyranny of the meeting that no matter what we do, no matter how we try to rope it down, it just comes back in ways that we don't like? I mean, a couple things with that. One is it's too easy to schedule a meeting. You just click a couple buttons and there's a meeting. If you look at Google calendars, one of the leading calendars out there, I wish it made a little harder to schedule a meeting.

6:13You know, imagine if you had to like put in your credit card every time you schedule a meeting more than 10 people. Also, their default meeting should be short. We should have shorter meetings, fewer people in meetings, and less meetings. And one thing you need to do from a calendar hygiene standpoint is every now and then, maybe once a month, just look at your calendar as a manager and say, this meeting I've been having every Monday, do I really need to keep running that every Monday? Can I change that to a monthly meeting? can I change it to an email? You know, there's a famous internet meme saying this meeting should have been an email.

6:47But one of the meetings that drives me the craziest are the stand-up status meetings. We go around the room and say, what did you do yesterday? What do you plan to do today? Then the next person, what did you do yesterday? Like, my God, can someone just put that in an email or a Google document? I don't want to sit there for an hour going around the room.

7:05Paul English:Why do organizations, thoughtful organizations, keep creating and sustaining meetings that everyone knows are a waste of time? I think a lot of it is mid-level management thinks that their job is to run meetings, and they put a meeting on people's calendar, and they feel good. Like, I'm getting work done. Look, I'm getting all these people together. And I'm not saying you don't need meetings. You need meetings, but there's just too many. I think it was Toby at Shopify who just randomly deleted meetings off people's calendars, took like a hatchet to the calendars or started deleting meetings left and right and saw what happened.

7:44Like, would people notice? And would they just create them again or would they be shy to create them again if the CEO deleted them? I know I interviewed Nate, the CTO of Airbnb about meetings at Airbnb. And he was saying if there's no agenda, he just hangs up. He doesn't say, okay, I'll check with you guys later. He just literally hangs up the Zoom call. And I think it takes visionary leaders who realize that you want time for people to actually do their work, to do writing and research and design and sales and customer support. And the more you put them in meetings, the less work they're going to get done.

8:19Paul English:All right, so let's talk then more positively about creating a meeting culture that works. And let's talk about Kayak. So you founded Kayak. You sold it to Priceline, which is now Booking.com, for$2 billion. And you say in your book, when asked, how did you generate so much revenue with so few employees? your answer has been that you focus on, one, hiring really good people, but two, the way you ran your meetings. So what is it that Kayak did right in terms of how it ran its meetings? Yeah, I was kind of a maniac in the early years. We designed our space, and we had all glass walls so everyone could see what's happening in these meeting rooms when they're walking by.

8:55And any time there was more than a handful of people in the room, there was 10 people in the room, I'd stick my head in. Everyone groaned because I knew it was about to happen. I'd be like, what are you guys talking about? that said we're designing a new interface for Expedia. I'm like, there's not like one or two of you smart enough to do that? Like you need 10 of you? And I would literally say this all the time. It got to the point where people were embarrassed to have big meetings at Kite because they knew that I'd give them grief about it. I also at one point bought a mechanical attendance clicker like they have at county fairs where you count how many people going into the big tent or whatever.

9:29And I'd hang them outside each meeting room. Not that we would literally count the people, but as a visual reminder, when you saw the meeting room, that someone's paying attention, the better not be too many people here. We also, I'm a big fan of ending meetings early. A lot of times we need to schedule for an hour because maybe you're going to need an hour, but sometimes you're done in 20 minutes. It's okay, let's end it early. And they give people an extra 40 minutes to go back to their desk. I did that all the time at Kike and people appreciated it.

9:55Paul English:What are some of the, I don't know, the rules of the road for having successful meetings? Is it, you know, we have an agenda, we have a moderator, we, you know, do something around the room. Yeah. I'll tell you about the meetings. Like I'll use Kai as an example. Talk about the meetings we did there. One is if you run in the meeting, there's two goals to every meeting. One is come to good decisions quickly. And the second one, I've never seen this written down anywhere, but this is what my belief is to improve the relationships with the people in the room. So meeting is an opportunity to engage, to fight in a healthy way, to go back and forth, to hear differing opinions.

10:31and we do that successful the meeting has energy and you improve relationships you if you have a meeting where someone's really annoying they keep interrupting people if you watch meetings carefully you'll notice things like for example men interrupt women more than women interrupt men once you discover this you can fix it and therefore improving like the output of half the people on your team so it's observing observing relationships do people roll their eyes when someone talks are they on their phone and just trying to make sure people are engaged and you want to end the meeting on a positive note you always want to say this is awesome we made a big decision on x y and z the next step is this so everything should be around making decisions and then coming up with

11:17Paul English:the next steps are so i want to push you on this a little bit because because you know you said when you were at kayak it wasn't just that you tried to run meetings better but that the way you you you and your team ran meetings was a competitive advantage. So talk a little bit more. I mean, everything you say makes sense. It sounds, yeah, that makes sense. But, you know, it sounds like you tried to get more out of the meetings that you did have. The meetings tied into the entire culture is one piece of a culture that was carefully woven. And one of the things that happened in meetings that would shock new people is how much authority we would give people.

11:53Like when I run a meeting, if someone spoke up about something, I would say, that's an awesome insight. Can you go and redesign how we should do that and bring it back to the team? And I'd assign that to a junior person, like change the process by which you're going to do something. And it was constantly pushing things down and assigning things so that someone would get an action and would take on responsibility of getting something done as opposed to doing everything by committee. I've always said that nothing was ever invented with 10 people in a room. If you have 10 people trying to design something, there's too many people who can say no.

12:29There's too many people who can bring criticism. I like small meetings. I think things are best invented with like two or three people in the room, especially if they're trained on, I often take my classes to improv comedy training to learn the skills of yes and to look at an idea of someone in the room and say, that's amazing. What if we did it this way? Could we use that in customer support as well as sales? Or if you're trying to improve ideas all the time and you train people, the meeting is a place we improve ideas and support each other. You can get a lot done with very few people.

13:03Paul English:I'm just thinking of Jensen Huang at NVIDIA. It's not quite the same thing maybe, but his view is I want to have big meetings. I don't want to meet one-on-one. When I have something to say, I want the big tent. I want to talk to a lot of people. I think it's partly so they don't have to do it over and over again, but also just kind of a general sense of transparency. And maybe these are different kinds of meetings he's talking about, or maybe it's a different philosophy, a different approach. No, I believe in sometimes having big meetings. If the purpose of a meeting is to share information, like we're announcing our quarterly financial results, or we've been acquired, or we acquired a company, or we're launching a new product, I believe in big meetings to inform people and also to make sure you're taking questions from the audience.

13:46What I don't like for big meetings is meetings where you're trying to design something or come up with something new. Because invariably, you'll have, let's say, just 10 people in a room, never mind 20, 30, or 100, but 10 people in a room, you're trying to design something. Someone's looking at their iPhone, reading their text message in the middle of a meeting, like they're bored. And when they do that, it's worse than them not being there. They're kind of sucking the energy out of the room. And you want meetings where everyone is participating. I look at my role as someone running meetings a little bit as like a symphonic conductor that you're balancing the energy, a little more timpani, a little more oboe, a little less violin, and you're moving the energy around the room.

14:28And if you're getting people to participate and you have – if you hire really good people and you get them to participate and help each other, it makes for exciting meetings.

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15:15Paul English:Legal teams are under more pressure than ever. More data, more complexity, more scrutiny. They need AI built for the realities of legal work. For more than a decade, Relativity has invested in AI built specifically for legal teams, designed to meet legal standards and support defensible decisions. The result is explainable AI that handles tedious tasks, so judgment and critical decisions stay where they belong, with you. Relativity is the AI platform for legal work. Learn more at relativity.com slash ideacast.

15:52Paul English:So we always try to be practical and give advice that's kind of immediate and actionable for our listeners. You know, what's a meeting habit that maybe separates great organizations from mediocre ones that people could pick up on immediately? I don't know that I could point to one. There are so many. I mean, have an agenda ahead of time so people come prepared. Start on time. Have it be a small meeting. If people aren't contributing, kick them out, particularly for weekly meetings. Try to make decisions during the meeting. The worst thing is you sit through an hour meeting and you walk out. You're not sure what decisions were just made.

16:29And you might say, well, that was an entertaining hour. It's nice that they fed us pizza. But did we really change a company in any way during that meeting? So have a tight agenda. Start on time. have the right people in the room, and make decisions.

16:44Paul English:There's also the phenomenon of the meeting after the meeting or the meeting before the meeting where stuff really happens that once attendees realize that, and particularly if they're not part of that other meeting, there's a little bit of cynicism that this is performative and the real conversations are going to happen in this sort of other gathering. How do you think about that? I mean, sometimes you need a smaller group, But if you do that continually, I think that can actually damage morale. The pre-meeting meetings often make a lot of sense. If you're doing organizational change, humans do not respond well to change.

17:20We like things in a static state. If you're making a big change in your company, you're canceling a product, you're buying a competitor, any big change. Sometimes before you announce that to a big group of people, you take the opinion leaders and you pre-sell them on it one-on-one, hear their feedback one-on-one adjust your pitch by the time the meeting happens you're better attuned to how people might perceive this news so i've done some of that some pre-selling of taking people who are the most vocal and run some ideas but i've had a time the post meeting the only thing i like about post meeting is if you name it in the meeting and say okay we don't we're not sure we're going to pricing let's have eliza go off and come back to us the proposal on pricing.

18:05And then that's a post-meeting that's been named during the meeting. I don't like it when the meeting seemed to make decisions, a meeting of 10 people and three people just change the decision. And it's bizarre. Like, why did I sit through that for an hour if three other people just did a totally different direction?

18:22Paul English:So let's talk about some of the other companies that, you know, in your book, you talk about that sort of have gotten it right or have done something interesting in terms of meeting culture. And, you know, one of them is Amazon and among other things, They outlawed PowerPoint presentations. Talk about the importance of that and how they think about meetings. So Amazon, we talked about them in the book. We interviewed Wayne Dussel, who ran AWS in Boston for many years, helped build that organization. And, you know, Jeff Bezos sent out the famous email to his team saying, no more PowerPoint. And you have to write a six-page memo that you read ahead of time.

19:01so the time the meeting starts everyone's up to speed and you get to work immediately so you're not spending the meeting training people and then work on the tough stuff you train them ahead of time because they've read the memo and they all walk in prepared i like that i don't do that all the time but i do it for big issues i guess that's the biggest uh thing at amazon i know um scott cook at intuit we interviewed him he was so inspired by that he tried to just copying that at Intuit doing the same thing because obviously it really worked well for Amazon. I'm not sure that the process for one company always should be the same for another company.

19:39There could be something unique about Amazon for why that works well. That might not be the best thing for your company, but I think it's important to learn from companies what are the best practices and try out and see what works best for your companies.

19:53Paul English:Yeah, I mean, I I think that's true with most management advice. There isn't necessarily one way to do things, but you need to kind of focus on something and stick to it and have a purpose about it. You also praise LinkedIn in the book, and their meeting culture seems to be particularly action-oriented. What do they get right? Well, I mean, first of all, Reid Hoffman is just such an incredibly impressive person. He was really big on the agenda. He's really big on the right people in the room. he's really big on if someone's in the room they're not contributing they should not be in the room so he was very action oriented he liked having fights in meetings he would talk about the utility of that of people hashing things out in real time rather than walking away like the worst thing is walk away in silent disagreement the boss says something and you just nod your head but internally thinking that makes no sense and you leave the meeting without saying it.

20:52Read is very much on being honest and transparent and saying what you actually think.

20:57Paul English:You know, the conversation we've had so far has been, at least in my mind, presupposing that we're talking about meetings where people are in a room together and sitting around a table. We haven't really talked about in-office versus remote and hybrid. You know, particularly as you worked on this book and talked to people, you know, do you feel strongly about in-office versus remote or in terms of having meetings that somehow accommodate both in the best possible way? I mean, I like hybrid. COVID taught us that remote can work. Many companies grew incredibly well during the pandemic and they learned to operate well.