The problem with your meetings? People
“Can you fix our meetings?” is something that I’m asked frequently. It’s not an unreasonable question given I started a company called Stop Meeting Like This. But sadly, there is no magic wand to energize your company’s meetings or to make them forums for rigorous and productive debate. Training alone won’t do it. Nor will reminders to “have an agenda” or “start and end on time.”
The problem with meetings—and collaboration in general—is a uniquely human one. To solve it, we have to start there.
PROBLEM #1: WE DON’T KNOW WHAT GOOD LOOKS LIKE
Most of us are the proverbial frog in boiling water. We’ve become so accustomed to the boredom and senselessness of meetings that we don’t bother to aim higher. Instead, we hide behind “having lunch” or “Zoom burnout” as an excuse to stay off camera and multitask our way through the day.
In fact, my team and I find that after we demonstrate what good looks like to a team, they rate their own meetings more poorly than before because we’ve reset the standard.
PROBLEM #2: TIME ISN’T VIEWED AS AN ASSET
If companies managed their time with the same diligence that they manage their money, knowledge workers would be accountable for where and how they invest it.
Instead, many of us are spending almost a third of our week just managing our inboxes. Meanwhile, employees spend a full 1.5 work weeks per month in meetings, and they report about half of that time is wasted.
PROBLEM #3: BAD COLLABORATORS RUN AMOK
The current work environment places a high value on autonomy. Individuals get to make their own decisions about which meetings to attend, how quickly to respond to emails, and how generous to be with their contributions to others’ work. While individuals may be evaluated based on productivity, no one is counting how much of a collaborative tax anyone places on the overall system.
PROBLEM #4: KNOWLEDGE WORK ISN’T MEASURED
Technology is making it easier and easier to account for where the time goes. Office 365 Viva, for example, analyzes how much time you spend in meetings and email every week. It also reveals unproductive behavior such as multitasking, hosting overly large meetings, or starting and ending late.
Privacy concerns have prevented many organizations from analyzing this data at the team or unit levels, but the tough economic climate and ever-tightening budgets may send leaders looking for a new source of optimization. Knowledge workers, they’re coming for you.
PROBLEM #5: LEADERS SET A POOR EXAMPLE
Multitasking is a plague on productivity. No matter how many times I trot out the science and explain that less than 3% of the population can actually complete two unrelated tasks simultaneously, the behavior remains the same. We have come to believe that multitasking is a “survival strategy” and that without it, we would be hopelessly underwater.
This belief is amplified because leaders tend to set a terrible example. I can’t remember the last time I observed an executive team meeting in which everyone stayed engaged. If the most senior leaders are signaling that it’s not possible or expected to remain focused in the current moment, nothing will change. There’s neither incentive nor consequence.
SHIFTING THE HUMAN SYSTEM
If you want to make sustainable change in how your organization performs, you have to take a holistic approach.
In our work, we focus on four interconnected threads that determine the effectiveness of collaboration:
- Leadership Behavior: The moment-to-moment signals that leaders send about what is valued and rewarded in the system.
- Team Health: The degree to which team members have high trust relationships and the psychological safety necessary to give one another feedback.
- Operating Model: The ways in which decisions are made, communication flows, and groups have shared expectations for how to work together.
- Work Practices: How individuals invest their time and energy and work across three modalities: meetings, focus time, and asynchronous collaboration.
When you try to pull apart these threads and repair them independently, the change is inevitably short-lived. Only by taking a holistic view and working on them simultaneously can you raise the caliber of collaboration once and for all.