Invisible Workers Get Cut First | Rebecca Hinds

28:51And that type of mindset, you know, where it's OK, most managers never have this conversation with their direct reports that, you know, what do you do if a meeting is on your calendar? Often because there's this weird psychological power of meetings where you send an invitation, you establish what's called a social contract. Even when we think about the words, you know, it's a meeting invitation. You accept it. You reject it. Those are loaded words in a way where you feel like rejecting the meeting isn't just rejecting the meeting, it's rejecting the person behind the meeting. And so having that level of psychological safety is important.

29:33That said, even in environments where you don't feel as safe to decline the meeting, there are other strategies. And in Your Best Meeting Ever, I walked through several of them. One is to approach it with curiosity. So say, you know, I noticed that this meeting doesn't have an agenda, or I've noticed, you know, I've looked through the agenda, and I don't see, you know, any way I can contribute to this meeting. Is my attendance really necessary? So framing it as curiosity can help to sort of dispel and destuage some of the fear, some of the threat that's often associated with declining the meeting invite.

30:14increasingly I'm seeing a role for AI to play in this. I've worked with organizations where if there's not an agenda associated with a calendar invite that meeting is automatically deleted if there's no agenda within 24 hours of the meeting. If you're seeing certain people not talk in the meeting they're automatically removed from the invite list and what I love about this sort of use of AI is it deflects the blame from the person or the perceived blame from the person to the technology in a way that feels more objective and less threatening. So when there isn't psychological safety at all in the organization, that can be a lever organizations can pull.

31:01I know for a lot of new leaders, when they get into that role, it's such a difference from when they were just an IC, when they were heads down doing the work. Now you feel as you're managing people, you need to know what they're doing. You feel your job depends on understanding what everyone else is doing and you grow this dinosaur tail. And many of us don't even realize as new leaders, the weight of our words, the weight of scheduling that meeting, what it means to our team members to put that pressure on them, to put them in a position where they don't feel like they could decline or they feel like they have to just agree with our ideas and we don't create an opportunity for them to share.

31:38It's this amplification effect, this magnification effect, and there's overwhelming evidence that the minute a leader walks into the room, the eyes fixate on them. They're influencing the conversation. You feel unsafe to disagree or combat, and that's why some of these strategies are absolutely really important, and ideally they come from the leader. You know, ideally, the leader is self-aware enough. Sometimes that's not at all the case. But ideally, they're self-aware enough where they're taking steps to mitigate that amplification effect. And so one of the leaders I talk about in the book is Ed Catmull at Pixar, where he made the judicious decision to speak last in the meeting so that people in their famous brain trust meetings where they were critiquing early films, a high risk activity.

32:34You know, you have your heart and soul poured into these films. He spoke last because he recognized that that primacy effect of the leader speaking first then influences the conversation. When Jobs was CEO there, he made a deal with Steve Jobs that he would need to stay out of these meetings because he knew that Jobs' presence in the meeting would create these perverse incentives for people to align and agree with the powerful person rather than voicing their own concerns. And so it's complex. It's hard. Ideally, you have the leader taking action. If not, you have a culture around it. And in the worst cases, you try these curiosity-led, technology-led interventions that hopefully, while they won't mitigate the situation entirely, hopefully they nudge it in a healthier direction.

33:30I guess it remains to be seen, and I'm sure you've seen the earlier data of how culture is going to be built with now AI in our lives when culture previously was built on human activity, habits, routines, and incentives that the company has put together. Well, even communication. So, you know, we're seeing AI, if we're all using GPT, we're defaulting to GPT's communication now. We're not influencing the culture. GPT is influencing the culture in the way the meeting gets summarized, what gets sent out, how the agenda gets organized. All of these used to be cultural norms set by human activity and human communication.

34:19And now AI has inserted itself and we're all typically using the same few models. So it's going to default to that culture. If the AI is interpreting the values that accompany for everybody, then it's set in stone. There is no individual interpretation or expression of those values, which adds the personality and the human touch to that culture. That relationship, the framing of AI within the organization, and in particular, what is that relationship between humans and AI? That matters significantly for how people end up using the technology. And there are a couple of different dimensions to this.

35:06So first, we see one group of companies where AI is very much treated like a transactional tool, right? People are using it to generate content, get their work done. It's a very transactional tool. What can AI do for me? There's another group of organizations where there's a higher percentage of people who are treating AI like a true teammate. So they're recognizing that the AI is not perfect. They're not just saying, what can the technology do for me? They're asking, what can I do with the technology? They're pushing it to think deeper. And what's fascinating is, for better or worse, that group that's seeing AI as a teammate, they're significantly more likely to be productive with the technology, they're significantly more likely to be enthusiastic with the technology.

35:54And so this sort of psychological framing in terms of how we use the technology differentially impacts how we use it and how it's enacted in our organization. What we're seeing overwhelmingly is AI doesn't change your organization culture, but what it does do, change it, transform it, I should say. But what it does do is it amplifies what already exists in your culture. So if you have a culture around, you know, a hierarchical culture, if you have a culture around using meetings as a lazy default for your work, if you have a culture around experimentation, if you have a culture around, you know, risk aversion, that typically is amplified by AI rather than any sort of, you know, radical transformation.

36:40And I think that's important to recognize and for leaders to be self-aware enough to assess, okay, what are our values? What are our lived values? Not just the ones we put on our website. Those are the ones that are likely to be amplified by AI. A lot of us have no problem with AI offloading work and making us more productive. I think the challenge really becomes when AI is now inserted into these human connection moments that are so important for us, team building, culture setting, you know, and I've even seen it where even cold email outreach has the M dashes. And I know all of a sudden I'm talking to a robot.

37:21It feels impersonal and AI is getting better. You know, Chachi Batila said, hey, you can remove the M dash. So us as humans, we're still picking up on when we're talking to bots and it's disingenuous and it creates a dynamic where I feel less invested in the interaction because you're less invested in the interaction. You're letting the bot speak for you. And I know it's one of the easiest ways to start using AI is to offload your email communication on AI, have it go through your inbox, respond to things, because we're trying to get to a place where the productivity creates the deep work. But it's now actually severing a lot of these close connections in the workplace that are so important to us performing well.

38:01Yeah, and you're exactly right, AJ. And it's an enormously hard problem because what's going to need to happen is every individual, every team, every organization is going to need to get clearer on what is that division of labor between humans and AI. And it's going to look different for every single person. And so ideally, we get into a world where AI is able to scan your email list for, you know, what is the level of emotional, emotional intensity associated with this email, right? Is it a message reminder for my flight to California? Or is it a message from my boss saying, hey, I, you know, you did a really good job on this project last week.

38:48Those have very different levels of emotional valence. And it should be able to say, okay, given the low emotional intensity email, I'm going to offload this, I'm going to take this on. I'm going to draft the response versus the emotional, intense one. Perhaps I do a first draft or perhaps I edit a draft you do. But being clear on when AI is injected in the process, especially for these creative human pursuits, is going to be the key unlock here. Because as you've articulated, we start to get into the territory of political risk associated with using AI to offload our work. So let's dig into structuring the best meeting ever.

39:34What do we need to do before the meeting? How should we be thinking about the agenda? And what can we do to make our meetings more effective and have people leaving saying, hey, that was the best meeting ever? Each of the seven chapters of the book walks through a product design principle applied to meetings, because if we're going to treat our meetings like a product, we should be applying those same product design principles to how we design our meetings. And so one of those design principles is around minimalism, right? Just as we design minimalist products, often they're the best products in the world, the Google homepage, ChachiBT, you know, no clutter, no fluff, you know exactly what you're supposed to do.

40:15The same discipline should apply to our meetings. And so I often start with organizations looking at four key dimensions of the meeting. So the length, the attendees, the agenda items, and the frequency. And for each of these dimensions, there are different strategies we can take to create more minimalist meetings. So if we take the length, for example, we know that meetings suffer from what's called Parkinson's law, and we've all felt it. Work expands to fill the time allotted. So if you schedule a 30-minute meeting, it will take those 30 minutes most of the time. And so thinking about the length, can that 30-minute meeting be a 25-minute meeting?

40:57I studied an individual in the book that used 27-minute meetings, right? Because that starts to convey to attendees that you've invested the time. So we can contrast it with what we're seeing with AI, where people cognitively offload. designing a 27 minute meeting conveys that you've taken the time to decide on those 27 minutes not 26 not 28 and people start to snap out of inertia they start to take the length more serious for certain types of meetings standing up meetings evidence shows they can run about 25 percent shorter and what's fascinating is when we stand up in meetings it actually changes how we behave in the meeting as well.

41:44And in particular, we become less territorial. And it makes sense, right? Because when we sit, it's, you know, it's our slice of the table, it's our chair, it's our desk, the room is divided into these tiny plots of land, when we stand, we become much more collaborative, the ideas become shared, the conversation becomes shared. And so a lot of these minimalist strategies are not just, again, aimed at efficiency, but fundamentally allowing us to collaborate in new and better ways. Attendees are another one. We talked about the law of two feet. That's one where you give explicit permission. The agenda items.

42:25So I'm a big proponent of framing every agenda item according to a verb and a noun. So you're not just saying, you know, team discussion. You're saying discuss this or decide this. Very specific actions because that allows you to become much more disciplined. And once you've done the verb in each agenda item, you're able to move on in a way that's much more efficient. And then frequency, getting rid of some of those pre-meetings, post-meetings. I'll often encourage organizations to try to schedule meetings at half the cadence. So take that weekly meeting, convert it to every other week. Often what organizations will find is they didn't need to meet as frequently and it becomes a much more disciplined communication culture.

43:19And so there are lots of strategies, but thinking about those four dimensions of meetings, I think is a useful first step to, you know, not just assume that you need to design meetings in any certain way, but these are the different principles that we can apply to our meetings. One thing that jumps out at me around the 25 or the 27 minute is oftentimes we time box because that's what the calendar allows, 30 minutes. We take up the 30 minutes. But for many of us who live full days in meetings, that 30 minutes is then jumping to another 30 minute meeting, which means by the last five minutes of the previous meeting, you're already thinking, OK, well, what's the next agenda?

43:57And who am I talking to now? And I got to perform in a different environment. So oftentimes the last five minutes of the meeting anyways, we're all checked out because we're trying to multitask and find what's next on our calendar. And I've worked with a lot of leaders just to actually time box, not scheduling back to back meetings, like recognizing that just because the calendar says you're available, put a tail on every single meeting so that you have time to decompress, to think through what needs to be sorted out from that meeting and prepare yourself for the next meeting. And I had a leader who was jumping from internal meetings to external meetings at talking to shareholders and talking to prospective clients, not recognizing that there's no way that you can mentally prepare for that next meeting if you're code switching from another meeting.

44:47Absolutely. And even when we think about I studied the CTO, the former CTO of the New York Times for the book, and he wanted to shift from 30 minute meetings to 25 minute meetings to have that five minute buffer. And even what he found, which totally makes sense, is if you schedule the meeting from 10 to 1025, hoping to leave those last five minutes, because of this Parkinson's law, because you still have technically that time available, it tends to also be, you know, overcome with meeting time. Whereas if you start five minutes after the hour or five minutes after the half hour, there's nothing to eat away at.

45:29And so even thinking about the structure of the blog. And what's fascinating is we also see that as soon as a meeting is on our calendar, even if it's hours and hours away, it's sometimes called the contracting time effect where our brain starts this mental countdown window where we know, you know, it's 10 a.m. we have that 4 p.m. meeting, we avoid doing very deep work, we're thinking about the meeting, we're ruminating about the meeting. And so again, things like no meeting days or scheduling meetings earlier in the day, so you're avoiding that contracting time effect can also be strategies. I've done work on meeting hangovers too.

46:10We know that we've all felt the groggy, irritated feeling we have after the meeting, we're still thinking about the meeting and ruminating about the meeting, even if it's good, if it's taxing, we have this residue that builds up. And often what we do to resolve it is we vent to our colleagues, which again, spreads the negativity or the overwhelm. And so thinking carefully about, you know, buffers, breaks, and how do we show up for meetings in a way that we're prepared mentally and cognitively to contribute is an important practice. Another thing that strikes me is the collaboration around agenda.

46:49So when I was a new leader in the company, and I wanted to bring agendas to the meeting, I found oftentimes that what was on my agenda wasn't actually as impactful for the team members who had to go out and do the tasks or work on the projects. And what ended up happening is I wasn't surfacing that meaningful stuff in the group setting. Then I had one-off meetings where now I have team members coming to me, hey, this wasn't clear. We didn't talk about this in the meeting. And now my calendar is getting stacked not only with the group meetings, but individual meetings for clarification. And I know you're a big proponent of really looking thoughtfully at the agenda and making sure that it's not a top down approach with the agenda, but we're actually choosing meaningful things for everyone who's attending the meeting in that agenda.

47:32The organizer of the meeting should always have the final call. You don't want it to be a grab bag of topics, but absolutely crowdsourcing the agenda. In particular, if there's ambiguity, if it's a project where there's a lot of different moving pieces and stakeholders where you as the organizer cannot fully comprehend everything that probably should happen in the meeting. So I studied organizations that use something called the Dory method, where it's essentially you're crowdsourcing the agenda, you're asking questions, you're asking questions of your attendees in terms of what's going to make this meeting most valuable for you in a way that tends to then minimize those spinoff meetings because someone doesn't feel heard in the meeting or doesn't get something resolved and they feel the need to understandably to schedule a follow-up or a follow-up after the follow-up.

48:26Now, even with the best intentions on the scheduling, the agenda, meetings can be messy. So how do we get a meeting back on track if we feel like it's spun out of control, even with the best efforts on Parkinson's law, great agenda, and having the right attendees? There are a few different strategies. One, I love the parking lot method where you have a physical space if you're all in person or a virtual space where you explicitly say for any topics that are still important, but are tangential to what we need to achieve and what's on the agenda. Let's park them in the parking lot and revisit them later.

49:05The key is you need to revisit them later or else people aren't going to buy in. And so I've seen many organizations that will create the parking lot and then the parking lot disappears and then it defeats the purpose of the parking lot. Here again, AI can help in a lot of cases. So I've used AI as a meeting moderator specifically for this purpose, you know, detect when the conversation is drifting off from the agenda and raise the question. Often you don't want to, you know, cut people off, although I've seen that happen with the AI. You want to nudge them back on track, ask the question, you know, hey, this doesn't seem directly related to this agenda item.

49:47Do we want to get back on track? And in the best cases, you know, the people in the room will have that psychological safety to say, hey, this doesn't feel like it's relevant to the agenda item we're discussing. Should we park it in the parking lot or does it warrant adding a new agenda item to the meeting? In those situations where it gets parked and it doesn't get brought back up, it feels very frustrating to then be attending those meetings. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of us, especially as new leaders, we want to be inclusive and we want to make sure that everyone has a say and everyone can participate.

50:24But I've been in meetings and I saw a very funny promotional meeting for Timothy Chalamet's latest movie where he does this Zoom where there's nine attendees. You can see half of the attendees are completely checked out. They don't need to be in the meeting at all. They're not decision makers. They're not actually engaged in the conversation. But we've been there where the meeting is just too large. And we're just sitting there wondering, why am I here? What is the point of this meeting? We've already covered the little sliver of things that I'm working on, but now I got another 45 minutes where I can't work.

51:00What should we do in terms of designing the attendees and think about that strategically so that it is an impactful meeting for everyone? First is that the number of attendees. There's evidence that seven or eight is the maximum. You know, that's the point where you start to see social loafing kick in. People don't feel accountable. We start to see multitasking increase as well. And so very rarely should you have meetings with more than eight people. You know, if you're doing something, often status updates are, you know, the bane of many organizations where you just sit around, each person gives the status update, right?

51:38That's an example of something that shouldn't happen in a synchronous meeting. And I walk through in the book, I call it the 4D CEO test to determine whether a meeting actually deserves to exist on the calendar. And the first part of that test is a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, discuss, debate, or develop yourself or your team. And so status updates don't pass that test. Broadcast briefings don't pass that test. Even something like brainstorming doesn't technically pass that test. And there's a lot of evidence to show that brainstorming synchronously in the meeting is not the best approach.

52:18It's much more effective to brainstorm individually and then come together to decide and debate because then you've crossed over into one of the four D's. And so thinking about the agenda, every item, every attendee rather needs to have a clear role in the meeting. So I use a three word test to define the role of each attendee in three simple words. If you can't do that, or if people, two people have the exact same role, that's a sign you don't need both people in the room. Often I'll see, you know, a manager invites their direct report, who invites their direct report, and you have this multi-threaded meeting, which ends up creating, you know, more cognitive load, more coordination tax on the individual and their manager and their manager of manager.

53:12we need to be very judicious about who needs to be in the meeting and, you know, what is the purpose of each person? And it should pass the 4D test. There was a question that went viral, and I think there was a quite a bit of a generational divide around this. But as we wrap, I'd love to unpack the visibility tax because this question was, should you take a job that is$240 ,000 a year, but requires you to be in the office five days a week, be highly visible, or should you take the$120 ,000 a year job that is completely remote where you could work from anywhere, you can physically arbitrage your location to get cheaper rent and enjoy being a nomad.

53:53And generationally speaking, it's felt like more millennials were like, take the high paying, highly visible job and more Gen Z were like, hey, take the fully remote job and the flexibility. And what wasn't really discussed is this visibility tax. So when you go fully remote and now you're not involved in the random in-person water cooler type meetings or being pulled into conference rooms because you're not visible. And we talked about this. Okay, now I'm not even being pulled into these meetings as they go through the 4D method. You lose visibility completely. And now you're just a cog in the machine.

54:28And you might be that first cog where they go, hey, can AI replace this remote worker? So this is something I've done a ton of research on. And the unfortunate reality is there is a massive visibility tax in so many organizations, definitely more legacy enterprise organizations. It's exacerbated on a different level than others. But absolutely, remote workers for decades have paid this visibility tax when they're not physically in the office. Now, during the pandemic, I studied a large number of remote workers who were previously remote before the pandemic and were working in predominantly in-office environments.

55:13So that's exactly the second scenario you're talking about. And I watched how their experiences, and I spoke to them and interviewed them, how their experiences changed through the pandemic. And what my co-authors and I found was they became much more visible in the organization. We called it a leveling effect where all of a sudden they felt for the first time on a level playing field within their organization. And what's fascinating is the key enabler to that was how the organization used technology in new ways to create that visibility. So they, you know, became much more written documentation cultures, much more transparent in those cultures, you know, meetings became the last resort rather than the first knee-jerk reaction, people weren't huddling, you know, over the water cooler.

56:11And so it very much is dependent on whether the organization is willing to invest in a communication and technology infrastructure that gives remote workers more visibility. If you don't have that in many organizations, unfortunately, we don't have that, you do pay this massive visibility tax. But that study gave me a lot of hope that if the organization is intentional about it, and we see this in remote first companies where everyone's remote, then we can recreate an environment where there is more of a even playing field. But it's a hard problem. And, you know, meetings are a key piece of it because meetings need to be intentionally designed.

56:51You can't forget to call the remote worker in, which is often the case. And it needs to be part of a very strategic, intentional, disciplined communication system. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing all these great frameworks and hopefully pushing back on some of our disdain for meetings as they do have a purpose and a value when run the right way. Where can our audience find out more about how to have the best meeting ever? So your best meeting ever is available on Amazon as well as all your favorite bookstores. My website's rebeccahines.com and I'm on LinkedIn as well. Thank you for joining us, Rebecca.

57:26Thanks so much. That was fun.

57:36And I would like to showcase one of our X Factor Accelerator members. Take it away, Michael. Hi, my name is Michael and I'm an accountant for an insurance company. Before the X Factor Accelerator, I struggled to build and maintain close connections in my social circle because I wasn't the best at sharing thoughts and feelings with others. The reason I joined the X Factor Accelerator is to improve my overall social confidence with my family, friends, colleagues, new acquaintances, and in my social and romantic life. My favorite thing about the X Factor Accelerator is that it helped me overcome my fear and anxiety when interacting at large social events so that I can now confidently approach others and make new connections with ease.

58:20What I'm looking forward to now is using the skills, techniques, and experience I've learned to create long-lasting and more meaningful relationships with the people I care about most in life. Thank you, Michael. It was an honor and a pleasure working with you too and good luck to you and all of your future endeavors if you've gotten value out of this or any of our podcasts head on over to your favorite podcast player and rate and review the show it will mean the world to us and it helps others find the show until next week go out there have an amazing week have an amazing weekend and we'll see you soon

59:11Bye.

59:33Thank you.