Meetings @ Work

Everyone Hates Meetings

Why does everyone in the world hate meetings? Have we all just given up on trying to make meetings better? If meetings are really as bad as everyone says they are, then why do we have them at all? Is there anyone out there who can help to banish meetings once and for all?

It is easy to say (or wish) that meetings would disappear, but I think we all know that the ‘Future of Work’ does not involve the elimination of meetings. In fact, as work becomes more complex, digital, and integrated, we can easily conclude that the number of meetings required to grow a business is going to continue to increase. So what are people really complaining about when they rally behind the meeting hatred movement?

Why Do We Complain About Meetings?

Here are seven of the most common complaints that I regularly hear about meetings:

1. Nothing ever gets done in meetings.
2. Meetings are a waste of time.
3. Meetings are of no value.
4. The wrong people speak up in meetings.
5. Meetings are not organized.
6. The right people are never at the meeting.
7. The meeting/team has a bad reputation.

I understand how people find it easy to complain about these symptoms of a poorly managed meeting, but I also question if we are all really just experiencing what social psychologists refer to as ‘pluralistic ignorance’ defined as a situation in which a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that most others accept it. In other words, we all vocally espouse how much we hate going to meetings so that we can match what we incorrectly perceive as the social norm. 

Can We Potentially Enjoy Meetings?

Stop and consider this basic question, “What if the majority of people actually enjoy going to meetings and just want to find effective solutions to eliminate these common complaints?” I also encourage everyone to stop and look critically at these common complaints to see if we are trying to personally fix the root causes of our problem or are we just trying to complain the loudest along with everyone else about these obvious symptoms. We have all read about the simple solutions needed to fix this problem: better agendas, fewer people, better time management, get people to speak up, get people to stop talking, or get people to track commitments and action items, but these suggestions don’t really seem to be having any type of impact towards eliminating the overall problem. So what can we do to actually make meetings not just good, but great? Something we look forward to rather than something we dread. Has the ‘Future of Work’ given us better technology to help drive real change? 

Accurate Complaints Allow Us to Create Better Solutions

Technology now available in the ‘Future of Work’ can fix each of these root causes and ultimately make meetings more enjoyable as long as we can overcome the ‘pluralistic ignorance’ that may be going on inside our brains. 

It is clear that our current meeting structure does not work. When we hear humorous expressions saying “the only thing worse than being invited to a meeting is not being invited to a meeting”, we know we have a major problem. 

Here are seven solutions that could dramatically reduce your level of participation in the ongoing meeting hatred movement:

1. Define the outcome for each agenda item
2. Set a max duration and stretch goal for each agenda item
3. Recognize the top strengths of everyone in a meeting
4. Leverage the top strengths of each member
5. Empower every member to maintain order
6. Leverage the right people at the right time
7. Transparently monitor reputation metrics

#1 - Good Meetings Have Clear Outcomes

We need to stop complaining about nothing ever getting done in meetings and start solving what is causing this perception. 

Meeting agendas typically contain a list of topics to be discussed by the team. Some meetings go one step further and define a goal and expected outcome for the overall meeting. The ‘Future of Work’ can now take this one giant step forward and define the desired outcome for each agenda topic. Selecting an outcome for each topic will allow the team to stay more focused on reaching that outcome and enable each member to understand appropriate behaviors vs. inappropriate behaviors during the meeting discussion. 

Below is a list of the 25 different outcomes that you should be able to quickly navigate and select as you put together your meeting agenda. What you may notice is that the meeting outcomes align to a similarly structured model for individual strengths, allowing you to leverage the best strengths of each member of your team.

#2 - Good Meetings Have Clear Time Frames

We need to stop complaining about meetings being a waste of time and start solving what is causing this perception. 

Meetings should be kept short and to the point and never extend past their allotted time schedule. Parkinson's Law states that people will naturally expand a task or conversation to fill the allotted time. People will become much more efficient (without sacrificing quality) if we set a stretch goal and encourage people to be more respectful of each others’ time. Some teams attempt to hold a standing meeting to encourage similar behavior and urgency. The ‘Future of Work’ allows us to automatically create a stretch goal that is half of the allotted time in order to establish a difficult, yet still attainable, goal. 

Providing both a ‘Goal’ and ‘Max’ time limit will change team members' expectations to avoid dragging a conversation out for the full scheduled duration. When was the last time you left a meeting that ended 30 minutes early? Our expectation should be to have this happen on a daily basis.

#3 - Good Meetings Recognize Everyone’s Unique Contribution

We need to stop complaining about meetings adding no value and start solving what is causing this perception.

We all have some degree of selfishness and want to be publicly recognized for our contribution to our team. The recognition we receive in meetings helps to boost our self-esteem and makes us feel respected and important in front of our peers. Unfortunately, our brain tells us to conceal this selfishness not just from other team members, but also from ourselves. I believe it is this lack of awareness of our need for recognition combined with our subconscious efforts to hide this need, that ultimately triggers team members to hijack a conversation just so they can be heard and ‘recognized’ for their disruptive ideas (I’m sure you’re picturing someone in particular right now).

We need a better system to recognize the strengths of our team members without causing disruptions and ineffective meeting behaviors. The ‘Future of Work’ allows us to identify and display the top strengths of each member of our team in order to publicly recognize their contribution and promote better utilization of all of the strengths available on our teams. 

Recognizing the strengths of each member helps transform the loose connections between individuals on a team into strong connections or alliances among everyone. This self perception becomes part of each individuals’ identity or self-concept and helps transform a simple team into what some call a ‘cohesive tribe’. Creating this type of cohesion creates more value for each member, more pride, more commitment, and more prestige helping to motivate them to defend the reputation of the team or ‘tribe’. This can also trigger a stronger propensity for individuals to create additional connections with people outside of their current teams to help create alliances that can be beneficial in the future.

Meetings create value when we (1) build strong alliances with other members who regard us as important and (2) help each other boost our self-esteem through genuine peer recognition.

#4 - Good Meetings Leverage the Strengths of Each Member

We need to stop complaining about the wrong people always speaking up in meetings and start solving what is causing this perception.  

In meetings, we typically listen to the people who speak up first and complain the loudest. This will often shut out more introverted team members who don’t have the energy or desire to interject their opinions into a conversation dominated by the more extroverted and expressive members of the team. Over time, this pattern hinders the ability for teams to engage in healthy conversations as members detach to avoid potential feelings of frustration and failure. Using technology built for the ‘Future of Work’, we now have the ability to identify those members of our team that have the appropriate skills or strengths to effectively lead a more productive conversation for each item on your agenda. Identifying the top three members of your team for each topic will ensure that we listen to the most qualified individuals and reinforce the alliances that are created when we effectively recognize and appreciate everyone’s unique strengths.

Connecting the model and data structure between the business outcome for each meeting topic and individual strengths for each individual creates a powerful bridge to help everyone use a common performance language and vocabulary. 

Over time, this leads to improved meeting performance by helping individuals become more aware of their strengths, and use those strengths to support the success of their teams. This creates a team culture where every member can empathize with and advocate for other members through supportive conversations. In other words, this approach helps to connect people together by creating a growth mindset that emphasizes collaboration instead of competition, creating a psychologically-safe learning atmosphere for everyone.

#5 - Good Meetings Empower Every Member to Maintain Order

We need to stop complaining about meetings not being organized and start solving what is causing this perception. 

Facilitating an effective meeting is both an art and a science. When things start to go sideways and people start to display bad meeting behavior, who should be responsible for maintaining order and good meeting behavior? If you think that it is someone else’s responsibility to help maintain order, then you obviously don’t understand the importance of accountability and group consensus in managing one of the most critical activities that lead to organizational excellence. Every team member must feel empowered to maintain order throughout a meeting. Using technology built for the ‘Future of Work’, we now have the ability to create clear expectations so members understand what type of behaviors are appropriate during a conversation along with a description of what types of behaviors should be avoided. 

Having these expectations clearly displayed for every team member to review and reference, allows everyone to exert greater influence to ensure guidelines are properly followed and collaboratively ‘call people out’ if they start to behave inappropriately. This will reinforce the trusting relationships between team members and create an environment where they can actually leave a meeting feeling happy.

#6 - Good Meetings Leverage the Right People at the Right Time

We need to stop complaining about the right people never being at the meeting and start solving what is causing this perception. 

When organizing a meeting, we should adjust the attendance requirements for each individual so we only have the right members in attendance. In the ‘Future of Work’ where employees move away from a rigid hierarchical structure to a more dynamic network of teams, the need to create flexible guidelines for meeting attendance becomes even more critical. 

Adding extra people to a meeting who are sitting there and don’t have the insight or relevance to actively contribute is a drain on everyone. The only people in the meeting should be the ones who have a stake or true insight on the topics being discussed.

#7 - Good Meetings Transparently Monitor Reputation Metrics

We need to stop complaining about everyone not liking our meetings and start solving what is causing this perception. 

We all want to understand what people think of us. We also want to receive validation that our perceptions are similar to what other people think. We become stuck and unable to fix a problem when we don’t understand the different opinions about what is broken and what requires fixing. Using tools created for the ‘Future of Work’, we can design a better system to collect meeting sentiment after every meeting to increase productivity and encourage better team communication. 

Making these metrics transparent to the team and organization helps to retrain our minds to start being more proactive, positive, and feel good about our teams and the contribution they make to the organization.

Asking these ten questions at the end of every meeting allows a team to understand their reputation and engage in the necessary conversations to fix anything that may require attention.

These ten questions cover all of the critical components of an effective meeting. They are worded very carefully to ensure we are reinforcing effective team behavior and individual effort. The final question about endorsing this meeting to a friend or colleague delivers a universal Team Net Promoter Score that can be used to universally benchmark any team. 

By just asking these same ten questions to each member after every meeting, individual awareness and empathy will reinforce understanding without judgment, leading to stronger personal connections and workplace collaboration.

Most importantly, the data that is summarized and transparently displayed to everyone on the team clearly shows where potential problems exist, leading to clear actions that can turn all of our meetings into ‘Good Meetings’.

We Can Enjoy Meetings… if they are ‘Good Meetings’

Meetings will never be perfect. At times, well-intended behaviors may backfire and disrupt the positive energy within a team. When things don’t go as planned, it is very easy to just start complaining about these symptoms and fall back into our ‘pluralistic ignorance’ so we can avoid taking responsibility. 

Instead, we need to hold people accountable for what we are aiming for. Rather than setting the expectation that every meeting will be a ‘Perfect Meeting’, we need to set our target on every meeting being a ‘Good Meeting’. Here is my definition of what a ‘Good Meeting’ should feel like for every employee.

Building this ‘Good Meeting’ culture creates the set of unspoken rules that people follow when interacting with one another. We all must be intentional in how we identify these desired behaviors that we would like to see in each other. We then need to work together to document them, work together to model them, and work together to enforce them. ‘Good Meetings’ start with you. You need to see yourself as part of the solution and not as an outsider complaining about the problem. Your meetings won’t get any better until you take responsibility and do something about making them better. Together we can build this new ‘Future of Work’.

Which Came First - The Chicken or the Egg?

Scientists have debated this simple question for quite a long time. Although we can’t be certain, the general consensus is that two animals that were not quite chickens somehow got together and laid the first chicken egg that grew up and became the first chicken. 

This is the perfect analogy for creating a good culture inside of your organization. If a team meeting is the egg, and organizational culture is the chicken, we could then ask this one simple question: Which outcome comes first inside of an organization - good organizational culture or good meeting culture?

Although I can’t be certain, I can say that after consulting with many teams and organizations throughout my career, it is typically a small team of employees who kind of look like chickens somehow get together to hatch an amazing team by laying good meeting eggs on an ongoing basis. The struggle is trying to teach the other employees how to create similar good meeting eggs so that the entire organization can grow up and evolve into chickens.

It is my goal to make meeting cultures significantly better than they are today. This requires getting teams of employees to change their values, minds, and skills to focus on this new ‘Good Meeting’ culture. Utilizing the tools that are now available in the ‘Future of Work’, we have the ability to hatch this transformational change. The chickens that will be leading your organization in the near future will be grateful for the efforts you made today to hatch good eggs in every ‘Good Meeting’.

Help Create this (Beneficial) Future of Work

Are you interested in helping to hatch this type of ‘Good Meeting’ culture inside of your team? Do you know anyone in your network who may be interested? I am actively looking for ‘early adopters’ who would like to pilot some early designs and help influence a final solution. Just to state the obvious: these ‘early adopters’ do not need to look like chickens. 

How to help make this a reality: 

• Please share this article with your network, and share your thoughts in the comments!
• Tag someone who you think would be interested in seeing this
• If you are not quite ready to join the effort, but still like this information, feel free to click the like button!

Thanks in advance for your help to eliminate the meeting hatred movement!