Meaningful Meetings with Steven Rogelberg

0:00Organizations and leaders, and don't make fun of me when I say this, need to start having some meetings about meetings. Yeah.

0:13What would happen if we just told the truth? Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patti McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

0:49Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I'm Jessica Neal here with my adorable co-host, Patti McCord. Hello. Adorable to you. And today we have the honor of speaking to Stephen Rogelberg, who wrote two wonderful books. One is Glad We Met, and the other is The Surprising Science of Meetings. You know, I'm so excited, Stephen, because Patty and I have talked about meetings and the efficiency of meetings for our entire careers. Yeah, right. And have tried to crack the nut on what makes them good and what doesn't. And it's always a controversial topic in any organization that you go into.

1:37And I love all the data you have about how much time we spend in meetings and like the fact that people hate them. So I want you to like tell people all about that. But before we get into meetings, I kind of want you to introduce yourself to our listeners. But I also want to know, why did you choose meetings? How did this happen? Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And yeah, I'm Steven Rogelberg. I am a dad, a friend, a son, a brother, and a professor. and I have been doing research on meetings for over 20 years. I was pretty much the first organizational psychologist to do that.

2:27And it's been really gratifying to see that this area of meeting science has exploded. And now we have such great information to bring out to the community, which has been one of the incredible things to watch with these books going viral. I never expected it, but it just speaks to people's thirst for solving this very vexing problem. Well, what got you onto it if you were the first? So I'm really interested in understanding pain at work. And meetings are certainly a source of pain. And I was really concerned that people are having days at work filled with meetings and yet returning home at the end of those days, just not having any sense of accomplishment.

3:17And that was very troubling to me, because if that's what our workforce and our global workforce is experiencing, that is incredibly unhealthy. And so that was really my entry point, was examining how meetings kind of affect the well-being and feelings of productivity of people. And then it just exploded, because there's so many interesting topics as it relates to meetings. So we definitely have stayed busy. Yeah, it's such a vast kind of thing once you start opening it up and peeling the onion because there are so many different types of meetings. There's 101s. There's the big team meeting. There's the company all hands.

3:57There's the executive leadership meetings. And you're right. A lot of them are not run well. And you have a lot of pain in the organization and a lot of people walking away feeling dissatisfied with work. But I think the unfortunate thing is they're dissatisfied with work, but they also don't understand what is important and what they should be working on. And that's what meetings are for, right? Or even the why of it. My son recently got promoted and I said, oh, what's the difference going to be in your job? He's like, oh, I won't work anymore. I'll just go to meetings. True. That's not far from truth at all.

4:41I mean, really, I mean, there's approximately a billion meetings a day around the globe. I read that. And so it's pretty tremendous. And then, you know, there's data to suggest that basically as you move up the organizational hierarchy, right, you could be spending 75 % to 90 % of your time in meetings. So that's clearly a lot of meetings. And it's a very important topic. You know, it's so interesting because so many organizations and so many, you know, chief talent and chief human resource officers all have a very kind of a lackadaisical relationship to meetings. It's almost like we assume it's the cost of doing business.

5:23And that is such a missed opportunity. You know, meetings cost organizations way more than their entire IT budget, right? When you think about time by salaries, it's way more expensive. And yet we take that investment very seriously, right? We even have chief technology officers who monitor that investment. And so we really care about that. And we're constantly reaching out, making sure our technology is meeting our needs. But when it comes to meetings, we just say, hey, yeah, bad meetings is just what it is. We're going to complain about them, but we're not going to really invest in doing something about them.

6:02Yeah. One of the biggest sins that I saw in my career was that like HR initiatives, they never die. Like I remember one of our executives saying, you know, I can't possibly have that conversation with her, Patty, that I've been telling you I was going to have for three weeks because my calendar is completely blocked. And I had him print it and I took a Sharpie. I'm like, what's the purpose of this meeting and why are you here? Oh, well, that's the meeting we've had for, you know, what's the purpose of this meeting and why are you here? Did we just hire somebody to manage that for you? Yeah. Okay, then you don't need to be there anymore.

6:35You know, I'm like, look at that. Six hours. Right? So let's talk about a couple of big things like meeting creep, how big they need to be. How do you step back? I think. Is that what you do? Do you coach people to just step back and look at them? Yeah, my work focuses on leaders as well as organizations trying to create better meeting cultures. So typically we look at meeting, we do a meeting culture assessment. We start doing audits of activities and trying to do the fabulous exercise that you did, Patty, just trying to eliminate those that we don't need. But first, I think it's important to remember that a world without meetings is actually much more problematic than the world with meetings.

7:20You know, meetings are an evolution over the command and control systems of the industrial revolution where the human element of work was marginalized. So meetings are a recognition that people's voice matters, that we want to engage their hearts and their minds. You know, meetings are essential for communication, cooperation, consensus decision making. So we need meetings. And in many regards, organizational democracy takes place in meetings. But with that said, we certainly can pair some out. There's some meeting habits that we just have. But there's other opportunities that I think are even more meaningful than just saying, hey, I need to go on a meeting diet.

8:01Namely, there's some better meeting choices that people can make, right? So when we think about losing weight, right, you could do a draconian diet and we know they don't work. But we can try to teach healthy habits. And these healthy habits, hopefully, they do tend to work over time. So for example, here are a couple of examples. Low-carb meeting diet. We're about to do that. Yeah, high protein here. Yeah. So here's an example of a healthy habit. When we think about how long a meeting should be, right? Most meetings are an hour or 30 minutes. That's not intentional. That's just us defaulting to what our Google and Outlook calendars tell us to do.

8:41That's not a meaningful reason to have a meeting for that length, especially given something called Parkinson's law. And Parkinson's law is the idea that work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. So if a meeting is scheduled for an hour, magically it will take an hour. But we can actually use Parkinson's law to our advantage, right? Because there's a good side to it. If we schedule our meetings for 22 minutes, we're actually going to get it done in 22 minutes. And so basically that is one very easy habit is just decreasing the length of meetings and do it pretty aggressively. aggressively and then if that new length isn't working you can always increase it again but that's an easy step yeah the other the other thing you said that that rang true with me was like the purpose of meetings is to hear people's voices and i'm sure this is going to be on your list but i i loved them on zoom when during the pandemic you have you know 27 people 27 squares and only two squares are talking yeah you know and i used to be on those and go this is an email we're not hearing anybody's voice like if the purpose of the meeting is to hear people's voices then they would have to speak or we'd have to call on them dang that's so true and patty the funny thing is as meeting size increases feelings of inclusion decreases i'm sure yeah we often invite right out of this spirit of inclusion but it actually has the exact opposite effect people feel like you're just checking a box and it doesn't feel genuine.

10:19What's the trick there? Let's talk about that for a second. So as a leader and at Netflix, you know, Patty and I were constantly trying to figure out like what the right meeting culture was. We went from like, you had to send out an agenda. People got to choose whether they wanted to come based on the agenda, if it was important to them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, really being careful and intentional to include the right people. But there were some meetings where, you did need the whole team there or what have you. But that's not really a meeting to have a debate or discussion when you have a lot of people in the room.

10:54I don't know. What are your thoughts? There was a lot there. And you had a lot of really interesting things you just teed up. There's so much I want to say. Say it all. I'm about to explode. Explode. Basically, let me share with you a radical response and then we'll unpack it in less radical ways. So basically, organizations and leaders, and don't make fun of me when I say this, need to start having some meetings about meetings. Yeah. Okay. But really, how could we not? If there's a billion of these things each day, and we know our people are wallowing and not thriving, why do we feel like that's a silly thing to do?

11:39We don't mind going back to this IT example, right? We ask people, hey, is this working for you? What technology do you need? Right? This is the kind of conversation that we need to have about meetings. Leaders need to sit down with their people and say, hey, okay, let's do an audit of our current meetings, what's working, what's not. Let's talk about when we need to call a meeting versus not. Let's talk about how do we do invitations to meetings? And let's figure out a way that if someone doesn't go to a meeting, Here's the agreed upon way of keeping that person in the loop. And by doing these types of conversations, now you're resetting the norms.

12:19Because one of the things that's really fascinating is that while people detest meetings so often, they also get really worried if they're not invited to a meeting. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah. So by having these conversations, we can start to push the reset button, right? And say, okay, when you're not invited to a meeting, that's actually a sign of respect. and here's what we're going to do to make sure that you're in the loop and you should know that in any future meetings you want to attend, you can. Right? So we have this greed upon way of keeping people in the loop and normative expectation.

12:53And that really works wonders for starting to decrease meeting sizes. So I like that approach. Yeah. Another nice approach is thinking about inviting people for part of the meeting, but not all of the meeting. Yeah, we tried that too. Yes. And it worked. Okay, good. And so that works really well for decreasing these meeting sizes. You know, the other thing that, you know, when I do these retreats with these organizations about meeting size, it's almost analogous to planning a wedding, right? So you're planning your wedding list. You have your nice-to-haves and your must-haves. The must-haves are very clear.

13:32We know who actually has to be there. It's the nice-to-haves. Those are the ones that get us in trouble. Because once we do one nice to have, you got to do all of them. Yes. Now we have to invite cousin Ernie too. And we haven't seen cousin Ernie for 30 years, but we got to invite cousin Ernie. So we need to not invite these nice to have. So we just want to validate the importance of the nice to haves. Let them realize that we're going to keep them in the loop and that they can change their minds. But we don't even want to make the nice to haves make a decision to come or not. Because that's a lot of pressure.

14:06Yep. And they're probably going to come because they feel like if they don't. And complain that it was a waste of time. They're going to look bad or not get promoted. Exactly. So if you combine these two things that we've just talked about, we combine decreasing the meeting size. And it's not hard to do because people are hungry for it. Yeah. We discussed decreasing the length of a meeting. Those two things together are actually much better strategies than just going on a wholesale diet. around meetings, right? Because that's actually going to return tremendous amounts of time to people. And then they'll be well-received, assuming you've had some of these conversations around meetings.

14:48Yeah. And I love the part about how you said, and we'll also discuss how the information is going to be disseminated. Because one of my jobs when I was at Netflix was to be the person at the end of our executive team meetings. And my job was to say, have we made any decisions here today and if we have how are we going to communicate them and when are we going to do it because i would find somebody be like oh i'm going to talk about it at my team meeting tomorrow afternoon i'm like well great neil doesn't have his until a week later and they'll all know because as soon as one team knows you know the whole company will know in 42 seconds yeah so So that timing was – and the other thing was it was really great to get consensus about, oh, well, I'm going to tell my team about it on Monday.

15:36I'm like, well, wait a minute. Tell them what? We didn't actually make a decision here. Yeah. We just discussed – you have an opinion, but that's not our decision. Right. So, I mean, there's also the protocol of like what actually occurs and how do you disseminate it later. So, Patty, I love what you're describing. It's fabulous. and one of the things that I talk about in my books and when I do trainings is this idea that meetings end, but they typically don't have an ending. Uh-huh. And those are very different things. Uh-huh, yeah. They end, but they don't have an ending. Great way to think about it.

16:12And the best practice is within five, seven minutes left, you stop, you stop, full stop. And then there's a review of, okay, here's what we decided. And for each of these things, You identify the DRI, which is Apple Talk for Directly Responsible Individual. And you also clarify what wasn't decided and what you're going to do about it. Basically, you don't want anyone to leave your meeting wondering what was discussed. Yes, but I think it's so important because what happens to your point is you run the clock, right? Whatever Outlook or Google tells you to do. You're at the end of the hour. you never leave enough space or time to have a discussion.

16:55Or everybody just gets up and leaves. Yeah, because they got to go to the next meeting. Yeah. You know, so they don't want to be late when you have a good meeting culture. And we did, I think most people at Netflix tried very hard to do this, to save five to 10 minutes at the end for wrapping up. And I just don't think enough companies do that. They're just running to the next thing. There's no clarity. There's no decision. There's no sort of what we're going to cascade, who's going to cascade it. And the other thing that you said that was so important, who owns it? Yeah. Yep. You know? So I want to share with you both something I think you might really enjoy, which is kind of an alternative way of creating an agenda for a meeting that kind of speaks to what we've been speaking about.

17:42Do share. Okay. So as you know, most agendas are framed as a set of topics to be discussed. So what I want to challenge leaders to do is to create their agendas as a set of questions to be answered. By framing your agenda as questions to be answered, now you have to really stop and think, why are you having the meeting? It's to answer these questions. By framing your agenda as questions, you have a much better sense of who to invite. They're relevant to the questions. You know if the meeting has been successful, the questions have been answered. Questions also serve to really motivate and engage people because we love answering questions.

18:20In fact, you put a question in the invite, people can't help but jump right in. And then here's the kicker. If you just can't think of any questions, it likely means you don't need a meeting. Yeah, you don't need a meeting. If it's a status update. Send an email. Or Slack or whatever it is that you use. Oh, that is, I love it. It's just, you're right. It's like this complete brain turnaround. It is, it is. Because it invites you to be prepared, which is the other thing that makes me crazy about meetings is everybody gets in the room and everybody's like, yeah, what are we talking about today? Yeah, it's just a small little switch that has very profound effects, right?

19:05Because when you start thinking of his questions and then it's like, oh, who do we need to answer these questions? That's good. Did our meeting work? Yeah, the questions were answered. And I love the thought. If you can't think of a question, yeah. Don't have it. And if you don't have people in the room that can answer, it's the wrong attendance. It's the wrong attendee list, right? So good. Can we unpack the one-on-one? because there's this whole revolution over the last year. Get rid of the one-on-one. One-on-ones aren't necessary. No. I don't believe that. I just don't. Well, because it's wrong.

19:41Yes. So I'm glad you don't believe it. Okay. Yeah, they're right. The only one-on-ones that should be eliminated are those that aren't being done well. Right. But one-on-ones are some of the very most important meetings you could have. It is the one meeting that should never be an email. So let me back up and just make sure that we're clear on what a one-on-one is, what the research that I've been doing. So when I'm talking about a one-on-one, I'm talking about a meeting that's orchestrated and facilitated by a manager, but it's not for them. It's for their people. Very important. Yes. It is not for them.

20:20And I tell managers this all the time. It's not about you. It's not about you. It's about them. It is about them. It is about them sharing what's on their minds, their concerns, their challenges, their obstacles, them asking for feedback, them asking for coaching. It's for them. It is this dedicated time for you to truly see your people. And that's what people are craving. They're craving being seen. This is why these one-on-ones are not for status updates because status updates are for the manager. And managers can get status updates lots of different ways, right? They can ask for an email. They can do it in team meetings.

21:00They have lots of choices. This is just this small, dedicated time where the employee can control the agenda and share what's on their minds. And when managers execute one-on-ones in that way, in a regular cadence, whether it's each week, every other week, each week appears to be the most ideal, by the way. And by the way, the amount of minutes matters less than the quality of the minutes. So the keys are regularity and dedicated minutes. It could just be 20 minutes. It doesn't have to even be an hour. But it's these 20 minutes where you are just focused on what the other person is saying and asking.

21:40And their agenda is your agenda. When you do that, the gains around them are incredible. You know, there's data suggests that employees who receive one-on-ones, like I described, their engagement levels are three times greater than those that aren't. they report more productivity teams report more productivity you know we've all heard the adage that people don't leave bad jobs they leave bad bosses one-on-ones are your way to prove you're not a bad boss they're the front lines of inclusion and then the really surprising thing that came from the research was when managers committed to these things on this regular cadence they actually reported having more time.

22:22And where they had more time, A, they reported being less interrupted throughout their days because people knew that they would have this uninterrupted time with their manager. The second thing, the second thing is by doing these one-on-ones, employees were more successful the first time. People were more coordinated on the team. So So there was less rework. Right. And this also promoted more productivity and more time for everyone. So one-on-ones, they are critical to leaders and organizations. Any organization that says we aren't doing one-on-ones, that is such a massive yellow light because basically without saying it, you're basically saying - I don't care.

23:10We don't care about our people. We don't care. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forming a connection with our people, that doesn't really matter. The other thing it does that, you know, I'm not a huge fan of sort of manager training. I love more activities that actually put you in the situation. And this teaches you to, you have to listen. Yeah. You have to learn to listen. And I mean, you know, if I could do one thing, the magic wand of like great leadership is not what you say, it's what you hear. and you know and that's just such a great way to do that to say wow i i wouldn't have thought about it that way because you're not thinking out loud you're listening you're listening that's what you should be doing and that's hard for a lot of people yeah it takes time but and practice and practice yep but the rewards are tremendous and it's interesting if a manager stops and thinks for a moment about a time in their past when someone with power took a genuine interest in them and how it made them feel.

24:14It's transformative. And basically they're just giving that gift to their people. And I think it's so important to remember that with COVID, what people missed was not necessarily going into a building and doing work. What they missed was connection, genuine connection. And one-on-ones are the vehicle for genuine connection. Yeah. Oh, you're giving me goosies. So I'm in venture capital now and I coach all these lovely CEOs and founders. And I was talking to one of the other, he's like, yeah, I'm not doing the one-on-ones anymore. And I was like, well, that's a missed opportunity. He's like, why?

24:57He's like, they're a waste of time. I said, because you don't do them well. Right. That's why they're a waste of time. Right. Like, you know, and so I love that concept and it's not about you and it's exactly what it's about them. And the other thing that it allows for, for you to like listen, but you get to listen to if they're doing the right things or not. Yeah. And you can help them. And that's why that productivity goes up. Yeah. I love it. And it also makes those, you know, what we perceive as these really difficult conversations, they're not that hard if you're pretty used to having a conversation.

25:35That's real. That's the winning point. Yes. Because when you build this foundation of trust and safety, it paves the way for future conversations. Hard conversations. And, you know, the other related thing that people generally hate doing is providing feedback to someone. Yep. But in these one-on-ones, when the manager says to the employee, hey, is there anything that you would like some feedback on? I'm happy to do it. If not, no worries. Yeah. Yeah. Then person's going to say, ah, I'd love your thoughts on X. And then you know, it's much easier. Yeah. And I'd add, do you have feedback for me?

26:10That's the bonus. Yes. I mean, if you can get really good at that, these one-on-ones are incredible. Yeah. And you have the data, Stephen, that says that it makes us all more productive. Employees feel more engaged. I love it. Better business is happening. Yeah. Things are moving faster. Yeah, the outcomes are clear. And I mean, the research on it's robust. I mean, Gallup did stuff with a million people, you know, looking at one-on-ones. It's there. It's totally there. And I would really argue that one-on-ones are competitive advantage for organization. that when you're doing them and doing them properly, you're basically creating an engaged workforce that's highly connected to the organization, who doesn't feel frustrated, who's having their problems solved in real time.

26:57That sounds pretty good to me. So like the thought of eliminating one-on-ones, like what are you trying to accomplish? Our boss, when we worked at Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, he'd do skip level one-on-ones. All the time. All the time. And the information that he got because he listened, He learned to listen, right? Was so powerful because he'd come back to the executive team and they'd say, well, you know, pontificate. Well, my team thinks this. He's like, well, that's not what they said. You know, right? Yeah. When I tell other CEOs that Reid spent all of his time in one-on-ones, they're like, no, he didn't.

27:32I'm like, yeah, he did. Yeah. That's right. He spent all his time. And it was powerful. And there was the occasional thing where he, you know, caused some friction. Oh, yeah, yeah. But most 98 % of the time, it was great. Yeah. Right? And the CEO having a conversation with you. Powerful moment. Skip level. Yeah. Pretty powerful. Yeah. And because it was a habit, people knew they were going to be next, right? And so the other beautiful thing about what you're saying is that it's like questions instead of subject matter. It invites you to be prepared. It invites you to show your best self, right?