I Hate Meetings. This Expert Showed Me Why I'm Part of the Problem

0:00Jason:I'm RJ Decker, a private investigator uncovering the sunshine state's darkest secrets. Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show. RJ freaking Decker as I live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger.

0:16Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And a public mess. Trying to get someone back to prison today? You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes. RJ Decker, series premiere, Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.

0:30Jason:From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show that solves entrepreneurs' toughest problems. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and each week I take a problem that you're probably dealing with and get tactical solutions from people who have been there and solved that. So, let's get solving. I hate meetings. Everyone hates meetings. Find me someone who says they like meetings. And well, actually, funny enough, there are two people who do like meetings. This is true. It comes out of academic research into how meetings function. There are two people who like meetings.

1:07Jason:And you will find out who they are later in the episode. How's that for a teaser? It's really funny. But wait, I've gotten off on a tangent. Meetings. Meetings. I hate them. You hate them. So why do we keep doing this thing that we hate?

1:21Dr. Rebecca Hinds:There are so many reasons, Jason.

1:23Jason:This is Rebecca.

1:25Dr. Rebecca Hinds:I'm Rebecca Hines. I currently lead the Work AI Institute at Glean, which is our internal think tank where we partner with great academic and industry experts to understand how AI is transforming work.

1:38Jason:And Rebecca has also taken this interest of hers of combining academic and industry expertise and applied it to meetings. She has a new book called Your Best Meeting Ever, which takes everything that we know about collaboration and meetings and puts it into a plan to make meetings better, make decisions easier, and make everyone's time better spent, which apparently is possible.

2:00Dr. Rebecca Hinds:It's been an area of passion for about 15 years. And I was first enthralled by the idea of meetings when I was working at Dropbox. And I studied their intervention that they called Our Meeting Get In. So essentially, the IT team flipped the switch and deleted employees' recurring meetings from their calendar. And everyone needed to start from scratch in terms of rebuilding, restructuring those recurring meetings. And then throughout the past 15 years, I've helped organizations of all shapes and sizes think about collaboration and use data to improve how they collaborate. And increasingly, that collaboration now involves technology and increasingly AI as well.

2:44Dr. Rebecca Hinds:But meetings are always the tip of the iceberg. And whenever collaboration is broken within an organization, you can pretty reliably trace it back to meetings.

2:54Jason:So back to a question that I asked a moment ago. If we all hate meetings, why do we keep having them? And why can't we seem to fix them? I mean, I don't know about you, but everyone at Entrepreneur Magazine complains about meetings as a waste of time. but we all keep having meetings. It's like we don't know what else to do. They seem to be some kind of necessary evil, and it is worth understanding why that is. Rebecca said there are a lot of reasons, and it starts by appreciating what the meeting represents in our workday and in our work systems.

3:25Dr. Rebecca Hinds:At the core of it, when we think about collaboration in general in our organization, so much of it is invisible, right? It happens through so many different people, places, processes, technologies, but meetings, meetings are highly visible. We can often see people's calendars. We can certainly see people in a conference room. Often you can see the zoom screen. And we know that we as humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. There's a visibility bias. And because of that, so often employees feel like if they're not showing progress, if they don't know how to move their work forward, meetings become the default calendar clogging reaction where regardless of whether you've done anything meaningful in the meeting, at least you've sat in the room and done something.

4:15Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And so we over-index on meetings, we cram our calendars, and we start to create this dangerous association between a packed calendar and busyness and importance within the organization. There are many other reasons why we schedule too many meetings and too many dysfunctional meetings, but at the core of it is this visibility bias and this presence equal productivity that infects so much of our workday.

4:42Jason:So how do we fix this? How do we create productive meetings? Better yet, how can we just make sure that we're all being productive and doing the things that we need to get done? That is what I am talking with Rebecca Hines about today on Problem Solvers, coming up after the break.

5:22Jason:VirtuoUp exclusively at Nespresso.com. All right, I am back with Rebecca Hines, author of the new book, Your Best Meeting Ever. Just before the break, Rebecca used this interesting phrase. She said, visibility bias. That we hate meetings because they are so visible. They are the visible part of our collaboration system, which made me wonder something. So here's what I told her. Possibly the problem isn't the meeting. possibly the problem is the entire system that the company is being run on and the meeting just happens to be the visible part of it that we all focus on hating that's exactly right so the premise

6:01Dr. Rebecca Hinds:of your best meeting ever is we need to treat meetings like a product meetings are the most important product in our entire organization where decisions get made priorities get set culture gets built and yet they're the least optimized and so each of the seven chapters of the book walk through a product design principle applied to meetings, one of those principles is systems thinking. You can think of Apple products, right? Your Mac talks to your AirPods, talks to your iPhone. The same is true of meetings where if you have a broken communication system, people are going to default and over-index on meetings.

6:36Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And we saw this very clearly through the pandemic where we had more digital tools than ever before, tools that should have allowed us to spend less time in meetings. We saw across all levels from individual contributors to executives, people spend more time in unproductive meetings. And that's because they had more tools. They didn't have clarity on where work should happen. They didn't know when they should use email versus Slack versus a meeting. And so naturally, because of the visibility bias, they default to meetings.

7:08Jason:So I feel and live that every day. And here I will out a problem that we have at Entrepreneur. These people over here aren't aware of this thing that these people over there are doing. And there really should be some better way for everybody to talk to each other. And the only thing that we could come up with, Rebecca, was to just have a regular meeting. Let's just bring everybody together. and I don't know what's going to happen on this thing, but we'll have everyone together. Maybe there'll be people who give updates or something. And it drives me crazy because I don't want this on my calendar, but I also am not exactly sure what to do about it.

7:43Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And it often doesn't solve the problem because work is so complex that all of this duplication of work that we see all the time in our organizations, it's not going to be resolved in a weekly sync where you try to get aligned. And so this is why the communication system becomes so important, having a central source of truth for people to understand what are the business priorities. The best organizations are very clear in delineating when we're making decisions, when we're aligning, when we're, you know, documenting the project plan, where does that go so that people can self-serve the information instead of relying on a meeting.

8:21Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And something as simple as, you know, having it clear or for your employees. This is our communication stack. This is what these different tools are used for. And each one is used for a different purpose.

8:32Jason:Can you give me an example of what good looks like there?

8:36Dr. Rebecca Hinds:So good starts with, you know, on your intranet somewhere, having a list of email is for this, Slack is for this, Asana, you know, usually organizations will have some sort of project work management system that again, allows people to understand the dependencies and move work forward. And then a meeting, you should be very clear on what the purpose of a meeting is. It should be used as a last resort, not a knee-jerk reaction. And so in the book, I outline what I call the 4D CEO rule, which is a two-part test to determine whether a meeting actually deserves to be on your calendar. And the first part, the 4D test, essentially says a meeting should only exist on the calendar if the purpose is to decide, discuss, debate, or develop yourself or your team.

9:24Dr. Rebecca Hinds:So status updates, don't pass that test, broadcast updates, even something like brainstorming, overwhelmingly there's evidence that that doesn't belong at the get-go in a live synchronous meeting. And so having that discipline to say, this is when we schedule a meeting, a last resort, and you should be able to ask 10 of your employees what the purpose of a meeting is and not get 10 different answers, there should be that clarity across the organization.

9:49Jason:Okay, two things I love about your answer. First of all, can you repeat the four Ds so that everyone can write them down? What are the four things that a meeting should do?

9:59Dr. Rebecca Hinds:Decide, discuss, debate, or develop yourself or your team. Now, there's a second part of the test where even if the meeting passes that first test, it needs to pass the CEO test, which is, is the content complex C? So does it involve enough unknown unknowns where it's going to be more efficient to bring everyone together and align on that ambiguity? E, is it emotionally intense? So if it involves reading emotions, managing emotions, interpreting emotions, you're delivering harsh feedback, you're soliciting a performance review, probably you need to get in the room. Human empathy, trust, body language is critical in those situations.

10:39Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And then O comes from Amazon. So is it a one-way door decision? meaning once you walk through the door, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to revert course and go back the other way. In those cases, the cost of misalignment is often too high not to get in a room for 15 minutes and ensure everyone's on the same page. Most decisions are not anywhere near one-way door decisions, but having that discipline around the four Ds and then the additional CEO test enables you to become much more strategic about how we're deploying the most expensive form of collaboration we have in our organizations.

11:15Jason:Right. And you're calling it the most expensive form of collaboration because you're tallying up all of the cost of everyone's time that's in that room, which makes meetings really expensive. I assume that's what you're doing.

11:26Dr. Rebecca Hinds:Exactly. And also the sanity, right? It's hard. Meetings are hard. It's hard. No other form of communication or collaboration requires us all to be synchronously tuned in to one another in a live setting. And so it's the time, it's the energy, it's the effort, it's the monetary costs in terms of salary and the sanity costs.

11:46Jason:Yeah. All right. So I had said a minute ago that there were some things that I loved about your answer and I don't want to move on before at least going back to that. So number one, what I loved was you laying out this guide for everyone. Email is for this, Slack is for this, meetings are for this and so on. Because what you're functionally doing is you are creating a communication operating system that allows for everybody to operate not by what they like to do, but rather what the company does, what we're all going to do. Because without that, what I find is that you just end up tilting towards whatever the preferred communication mechanism is of the most senior person that you're engaging with.

12:31Jason:And then things are constantly changing, basically depending on who is in the mix of the people that you're talking to. It also now leads me to wonder, as you have laid out these ways of deciding functionally, should a meeting exist or not? What happens if the answer is no?

12:48Dr. Rebecca Hinds:It depends on what it is, right? If it's an announcement to your whole company, then maybe an email, if it's a, you know, status update, maybe it's a Slack channel, it's not only important to delineate, okay, for channel X, this is the purpose for technology X, this is the purpose, but also the norms around it. Employees want this clarity. We actually did a study a couple years ago where we took a group of Amazon employees and a group of Asana employees and asked them to stop using half of their collaboration tools for a period of two weeks. And it was fascinating because after the two-week period, most people who participated said they had too many tools and they could permanently eliminate one or more tools.

13:34Dr. Rebecca Hinds:But we measured something that my colleague Polly and Artie calls digital exhaustion, right? How exhausted do all the technologies that we feel we need to use at work make us feel? That actually increased through the study. And what we found happen is people wanted to do more, they wanted to standardize, they didn't want to use three different meeting platforms in the organization, but they alone could not make that determination, because so much of our technology use depends on our customers, our boss, our team, our direct reports. And so having that leadership top down guidance in terms of this is our standard stack, here's the purpose, here are the norms around it is so important right now, especially when we add AI into the mix.

14:17Jason:You write about something called a meeting doomsday. Can you tell me what that is?

14:23Dr. Rebecca Hinds:Yes. So I just described what I call a collaboration cleanse. And the collaboration cleanse actually came after the meeting doomsday, which is a 48 hour reset on your calendar. So for 48 hours, people are invited to delete their recurring meetings from their calendar. After those 48 hours, they're invited to re-add meetings back to their calendar, but do so in a way they think is going to be most productive and effective. What we see happen is that reset not only saves a whole bunch of time, and I've seen meeting doomsdays save five hours per person per month, 11 hours per person per month, but it also starts to reset your assumptions about what actually deserves to be on the calendar.

15:08Dr. Rebecca Hinds:And so we've done the comparison, you know, meeting audit, where the meetings are still on your calendar, you're evaluating them one by one, that keeps you in the mindset of defending the meetings that are already on your calendar. Whereas the meeting doomsday allows you the liberty to start from scratch. So much of our meetings are social contracts where we feel obligated to show up, we think that canceling the meeting is, you know, a personal affront to the other person, We worry about hurt feelings. And so a meeting doomsday allows you to overcome some of those psychological underpinnings that we know in many ways contribute to this feeling that we need to keep meetings on our calendar and legacy meetings on our calendar.

15:51Jason:Yeah. I once interviewed a woman named Sarah who had established this rule at her company, which was that anybody could opt out of any meeting at any time, including with the CEO. I loved that. She had instituted that essentially as a way to show people that they are in control of their own time and that time is very valued at this company. And so if you have a better way to spend that time, you should. It also undercut what you just described, which is this weird social contract, especially when there's hierarchy involved, where the idea of canceling a meeting with someone who is higher than you seems just impossible.

16:34Jason:You have to show up for this thing. And what that, I think, creates is a feeling that there is also a hierarchy of whose time is valued.

16:46Dr. Rebecca Hinds:Absolutely. And we know that executives disproportionately schedule more meetings than anyone else. I've been in many organizations where they enact, sometimes it's called the law of two feet, right? If you're not contributing value to the meeting or you're not deriving value from the meeting, use your two feet and leave the meeting. And, you know, sometimes that's posted in meeting walls. I've even studied organizations where you're given a prize if you're the first person to walk out of an unproductive meeting, right? And so it depends so heavily on the level of psychological safety within the organization.

17:19Dr. Rebecca Hinds:There are many organizations where employees are never going to feel comfortable doing that. And in those cases, there are other mechanisms that you should, you know, enact and deploy. But in the best organizations, you do have that acknowledgement. and the manager has the conversations with the direct reports, most managers have never once talked to their direct reports about being free to leave a meeting, leave an unproductive meeting. And so normalizing this activity is a key part to, you know, encouraging employees to actually enact it.

17:51Jason:Yeah, that was Sarah Kellogg-Neff, by the way. Shout out to Sarah. I didn't say her full name. So Rebecca, what are we to do about this? Because look, people can listen to this conversation They can and should read your book, but there's that. And then there's actually fixing the problem of meetings, which is different. So how do we start to actually implement these ideas and who does that fall to? Can we, do we just have to sit around and hope that the CEO of the company reads your book?