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

[MUSIC] Deals not just another payroll platform, it's when your team might actually enjoy. HR, IT, and payroll together finally. Built in-house, built for peace of mind. Visit d-e-l.com/hbrpodcast. [MUSIC] I'm Adi Ignatius. I'm Allison Beard, and this is the HVIR IDA CAST. [MUSIC] All right, Allison. Today's topic is one that every single listener is sure to have strong views about, and that is meetings. So, Allison, 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% of their work time in meetings, 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 US salary, 30,000 hours, faster than a day. Anyway, it works out to about $870 billion in the US wasted in pointless meetings. That's about 6% of the US GDP. Oh, 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 carve about the negative. We can 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. 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. It feels very deeply about meetings. And you start with why meetings can really suck the energy out of a company. 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. 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. They just don't take it seriously 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. 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, take the average white collar 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 people who've had like a timer showing dollar bills flying by. So you know, and that's good. But the problem's 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, "This free pizza provided. He groans and this is 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 their 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." 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 as 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 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 call a code my calendar. And I've been doing this for 20 years. Every Monday, Friday, I look at my calendar two weeks in advance with my assistant. And I look at things like, "What percent of my meetings are initiated by me?" As opposed to, "I'm doing some of my favorite by sitting in an 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, Doug, I'm going to be right. I 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 a bed on the weekends, that's not a very good work scenario. 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, stand-up meetings. But they always come back. 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'm going to cover things with that. One is it's too easy to schedule a meeting. Just click a couple of buttons and there's a meeting. If you look at Google Calendar, there's one of the leading calendars out there. I wish it made a little harder to schedule a meeting. Imagine if you had to like put in your credit card every time you schedule a meeting more than 10 people. Also the 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. But one of the meetings that drives me the craziest, the stand-up status meetings we go around the room and says, "What do you do yesterday? What are you planning to do today?" Then the next person, "What do you do yesterday?" And 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. 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, things that their job is to run meetings. And they put a meeting on people's count and they feel good. Like, I'm getting worked on. 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, decided deleting meetings often right and saw what happened, like, with people notice. And would they just create them again or would they be shy to create them again? The CEO deleted them. I know I interviewed Nate, the CTO of Airbnb about, means it 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. All right, so let's talk then more positively about creating a meeting culture that works. And let's talk about kayaks. You found a 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 write 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. Everyone could see what's happening in these meeting rooms on their walk and buy. And anytime it was more than a handful of people in the room, there's 10 people in the room. I'd stick my head in and everyone groaned because they knew it was all going to happen. I'd be like, "What are you guys talking about?" They 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 a point where people were embarrassed at big meetings at Kay because they knew that I'd give them grief about it. I also at one point bought a mechanical attendance clicker like they have it County Fairs where you count 20 people going into the big tent or whatever. And 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 bed and not be too many people here. We also, I'm a big fan of ending meetings early. A lot of times I mean to just go to 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 next to 40 minutes to go back to their desk. I did that all the time at Kayak and people appreciated it. What are some of the rules of the road for having successful meetings? Is it we have an agenda, we have a moderator, we do something around the room. I'll tell you about the meetings. I'll use Kayak 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 the people in the room. So meetings and opportunity to engage, to fight in a healthy way, to go back and forth, to hear different opinions. opinions, and we do that successful. The meeting has energy, and you improve relationships. If you're ever meeting where someone's really annoying and they keep interrupting people, if you watch mean is 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 the output of half the people on your team. So it's observing, observing relationships to people, roll their eyes when someone talks. 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 the next step, sour. I want to push on this a little bit, because you said when you were at kayak, it wasn't just that you tried to run meetings better. But the way 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 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, like when I went in 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'll assign that to a junior person, like, change the process by which you're going to do something. And it's constantly pushing things down and assigning things so that someone will get an action and would take on responsibility getting something done as opposed to doing everything by committee. I always said that nothing was ever invented with 10 people in the room. If you have 10 people trying to design something, there's too many people who can say no. There'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? Or if we use that in customer support as well as sales? Or just try to improve, 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. I'm just thinking of Jensen Huang at Nvidia who, 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 because they have to do it over and over again, but also just kind of a general sense of transparency. Maybe these are different kinds of meetings. He's talking about, or maybe it's a different philosophy, a different approach. I believe in sometimes having big meetings. If the purpose of 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. What 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 the 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 the meeting, like they're bored. When they do that, it's worse than them not being there that kind of suck in the energy out of the room. 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. If you're getting people to participate and you have, if you hire really good people and you're getting them to participate and help each other, it makes for exciting meetings. So we always try to be practical and give advice that's kind of immediate and actionable for our listeners. 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, having a 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 are just made. And you might say, well, that was an entertaining hour as nice that they fed us pizza, but did we really change the 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. There's also the phenomenon of the meeting after 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. We like things in a static state. If you're making a big change, you're 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 that 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're not sure we're going to be pricing. Let's have a liza go off and come back to us and propose on pricing." 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 3 people just change the decision. It's bizarre. Why did I sit through that for an hour? 3 other people just did a totally different direction. Let's talk about some of the other companies that, in your book, you talk about that sort of have gotten it right or have done something interesting in terms of meeting culture. 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. Amazon, we talked about them in the book. We interviewed Wayne Dusa who ran AWS in Boston for many years, helped build that organization. Jeff Bezos sent out the famous email to his team saying, "No more PowerPoint." You have to write a six-page memory that you read ahead of time. The time the meeting starts, everyone's up to speed and he gets to work immediately. You're not spending the meeting training people and then work on the tough stuff. They 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 thing at Amazon. I know Scott Cook it into it when we interviewed him. He was so inspired by that. He tried to just copy that and into it 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. It 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? Yeah. I think that's true with most management advice. There isn't necessarily one way to do things, but you need to focus on something and stick to it and have a purpose about it. You also praise LinkedIn in the book. And your meeting culture seems to be particularly action oriented. What do they get right? Well, first of all, Reathop and he's 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, right of the walking away. Like the worst thing is walk away in silent disagreement. The boss is something and you just nod your head, but internally, I think that makes no sense. And you leave the meeting without saying it. Reath is very much on being honest and transparent and saying what you actually think. 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 in sitting around the table. We haven't really talked about in office versus remote and hybrid. You know, particularly as you work in this book and talk to people, 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'm not like hybrid. COVID taught us that remote can work. Many companies grew incredibly well during the pandemic and they learned to operate well. And then people got comfortable saying, I like this that I can work from home a couple days a week so I don't have to do an hour commute in the morning and the afternoon. And I'm going to choose my employers by one. that let me have this mix of some in office, some at home. And a lot of top employees are making the dishes that way. There is a movement in tech right now to get people back in the office five days a week, but a lot of people are resisting it. I've seen Habit work really well. Like my own company, we work mostly remote and we meet in person about once a week. But we also have new people meet more often without people in the team, just so they get up to speed and form the relationships. A lot of the impression stuff is just around relationship forming. If you have a senior team that already has good relationship, you don't have to do the impression as often. There's a truism that the best meaning is either everyone is remote. Everyone is dialed in or everyone is there in person. When you try to do both, somehow half the people are going to not quite be fully engaged, et cetera, et cetera. Do you agree with that or do you think you can manage that hybrid aspect? I have one nitpick that I recommend. Anytime a meeting is some people on the room together and some people are remote, the video cameras are up in the wall, which video the room is horrible, because you'll look at a Zoom meeting with five tiles and one of them is 10 people on it. You can't see who those 10 people are. You can't get the nuances of their facial expressions all that. So my thing is, if you're going to have a hybrid meeting where some people are together and some are remote, make all the people in the room together. Each have their laptop open, just mute their microphones. So at least when you have a person on Zoom, you can see each person of the meeting. But sometimes it just happens that way. I'm helping create a new travel company with my old Kai Kofana Steve Halfner. And half the team is a New York half the team is in Boston. In fact, Kaiak itself was created that way. The development was done in Boston. The sales are market and we're done in Connecticut. And we try to do that, put everyone on their own laptop, so they look like equals in the Zoom meeting. Yeah. Okay. So if you're advising a CEO whose employees are routinely saying meetings are the worst part of working here, what does that tell you about the organization and what should that person do first? I'm an Ed Proban. I think it's important for your listeners who are running companies. It's really important to survey the team and saying how people are feeling about meetings. I put an anonymous service out there and say, give feedback and then train your managers how to run better meetings because, again, my server of 1,000 people, over half those people said over half the meetings were a complete waste of time. That's horrible. Not for just the loss of salary, but the loss of productivity and for the degradation of morale that's done in those bad meetings. I think just the first thing is you can't improve something until you measure it. So if you're running a company, you have to measure people who are spending a lot of time in meetings, are they enjoying it? Are they getting the right decisions made? Is it clear? Do they come prepared? You have to survey that stuff and then have someone responsible for training people how to run better meetings. All right. So another practical question. So if the CEO wants to improve its meeting capacity immediately, what's like the highest return intervention, whether it's fewer meetings, smaller meetings, better agendas, more joy, where would you start? I spoke to the CEO of booking holdings, Glenn Fogo a while ago. I have since writing the book created a company that takes some of the ideas of the book and we're trying to, if the software they were building is going to help people improve meetings. I went to Glenn and I told him what we're working on and I said, would you be interested doing a pilot at bookend.com? He said, I tell you what, if I are using your software, you just randomly deleted half my meetings, I'll pay you whatever you want. So I think Glenn was saying as an executive running an organization of tens of thousands of people, he thinks it's too much that people are turning meetings and he's just like, help me figure out, I mean, don't randomly cancel meetings, but help me figure out which weekly meeting should be monthly accordingly, which meeting should be canceled, which 10 person meeting should be three person meetings. They mean some discipline about efficiency and what you find when you try to do that meeting surgery of making fewer meetings less often less people is you have to improve process in order to do that. Kind of seem people say, I can't miss the weekly meeting. These things are decided there. Well, you got to find another way to do it. If you're not going to do it with 10 people around the room for an hour every Monday. All right. So I have to lead a meeting after this. Give me a pep talk. So the first thing is make sure everyone in the room talk, start on time, start with high energy, make sure the team sees it, you're excited. I remember when I worked for Bill Campbell it and to it, every time I walked in his office, I left his office thinking like he woke up today just to see me. So make those people in the next meeting feel that that's the best meeting of your day and how excited you are to help them together. And then bounce the energy around the room, have everyone participate. It'll be a fun meeting if the energy moves around the room and everyone has something to add. Paul, thank you for joining us today. All right. Thanks a lot. That was Paul English, co-founder of Kayak and author of the meeting book, How the Best Companies Meet Better. Next week, Allison dives into how leaders can handle rule breaking better. If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You'll get access to the HPR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter and unlimited access to HPR online. Just head to hpr.org/subscribe. And thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dew, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production editor, Kristen Murphy Romano. And thanks to you for listening to the HPR IdeaCast. We'll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I'm Idykacious.