Why Meetings Go Wrong (And How to Fix Them)

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

How many meetings will you attend today? This week? This year? How much of your time do you spend gathered around a conference table with colleagues, looking at plans or presentations or P&Ls? Our guest today estimates that, in the U.S. alone, organizations play host to 55 million meetings per day.

UGH.

Why do I say ugh? Don’t we get important work done in meetings? Aren’t they a good use of time?

Research says not really. Apparently, 30 percent to 50 percent of the hours we spend in meetings aren’t productive. 73 percent of people admit to doing other work during meetings; 90 percent report daydreaming. And 64 to 65 percent of managers say meetings keep them from work and deep thinking.
Should we just accept that a lot of meetings will be boring and wasteful? Or are there ways to avoid bad meetings, plan good ones and get more out of the whole process?

Steven Rogelberg is a professor at the University of North Carolina Charlotte. He’s the author of the book The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance and the HBR article “Why Your Meetings Stink – And What to DO about it.” Steven, thanks for being here.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Oh, it’s great to be here. Thank you.

ALISON BEARD: So this seems like a problem that just never goes away for people working in organizations. Why are most of our meetings still so terrible?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: So first of all, the research suggests that only around 20 percent of leaders receive any training on meetings. I mean, that is crazy. And the training that’s typically done in organizations, when it exists, tends to be very superficial.

For example, it focuses on tactics, do this tactic; you know, always have an agenda and that will make your meetings better but our research suggests that that’s actually not the case. Agendas in and of themselves actually don’t improve meeting quality. It’s a much more nuanced discussion.

So we have a lack of training. Most organizations have no content at all on their employee engagement surveys around meetings so there’s no feedback or accountability and then, here’s something that’s a little bit more subtle, who owns meetings in organizations? Right? There’s no CMO, chief meeting officer. Instead, this meeting activity, despite it taking so much time, is probably the single biggest line item on a budget that goes unlooked at, unaccounted for, and no one is saying, hey, I want to make meetings better in our organization.

ALISON BEARD: And then as individual leaders, we’re not instinctively good at running them?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: No, no. That’s the crazy thing. So in our research, we find that when you interview folks, let’s say leaving a meeting, and you ask them, hey, how was that meeting? Invariably, there’s one person who says, ah, I really liked it, I thought this was a really good meeting. And do you want to guess who that is?

ALISON BEARD: The leader of the meeting.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Yes. The meeting leader.

ALISON BEARD: I’ve read the book so it’s not fair to ask me.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Oh, okay. Fair enough, fair enough. Yeah, so that meeting leader.

ALISON BEARD: And worked with you on the article so –

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Okay. So that meeting leader. And so, this is kind of a blind spot. Right? So if a meeting leader is thinking that they’re doing it well and you have no feedback and accountability systems built into, kind of, the organizational fabric and there’s no training, right, this is a triple whammy that’s explaining why meetings are just not going well in organizations.

ALISON BEARD: Right. So, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see individual leaders making when they’re running meetings?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: There are so many things. You know, from too many people in the meeting to a meeting that’s too long to starting a meeting off very poorly, not helping create that separation from what someone was doing before the meeting to what they’re doing now; to having stale meeting practices, never experimenting, never trying alternative meeting formats to ending the meeting with no purpose where people have no clue about what was truly decided.

ALISON BEARD: And why, when most of us are making these mistakes, do we come away thinking, oh, that wasn’t a bad meeting?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: It really connects to our voice. When we hear ourselves speaking a lot and sharing our opinion, we tend to think that was a really good experience for everyone. It’s kind of like, you know, imagine someone going on a blind date and doing all the talking. They might say, wow, this was a great date, but the other party doesn’t really necessarily think that way.

ALISON BEARD: So how do I get feedback on the way I run meetings? What are some mechanisms I could use?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: So, ideally, the organization has built some systems but in the absence of that, you have to own it. Right? So, you know that you’re inviting people to your meeting. You’re asking people to give you the biggest gift that they have which is time. You have to make sure that you’re honoring people’s time, that you are a good steward of other’s time. So as a leader, you have to be willing to evaluate your meetings periodically. In this evaluation you ask your folks, what am I doing well, what’s not going so well, and what are some things that we can do differently to make our meetings really work?

Those three simple questions will yield so much meaningful data and it communicates to your folks this real commitment to make this shared experience better. Now if you are unwilling to do this kind of assessment, at the very least, at the very least, I encourage you to scan for cues of ineffectiveness. If you’re leading a meeting and you look out there and everyone is on their phone, that is a signal that you’re not very good at running a meeting.

If you look out there and there are a bunch of side conversations, that is again a signal that you’re not really good, you’re not that good at running meetings. And if you have a meeting and you’re doing basically all the talking, that is another signal. So these signals are cues to say, gosh, okay, I need to make sure that I’m actively facilitating. If everyone is on their phone, that’s probably a cue that you invited way too many people and that the agenda was not highly relevant to a lot of people.

ALISON BEARD: I’m glad that you mentioned phones because I do think technology has become a big part of meeting distraction. People do bring their phones. Lots of my colleagues bring their laptops and, ostensibly, they’re taking notes or able to look things up or sort of getting work done in the meeting that’s directed by the meeting which I guess is okay but just this idea that everyone has the ability to do other things often really derails meetings. Right?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: It does. You know, the research shows that even folks who do lots of multi-tasking in meetings, okay, this is pretty funny and you won’t be surprised, so even the people who are heavy multi-taskers are still disturbed by other people’s multi-tasking.

So, you know, multi-tasking is frustrating for folks. There’s a contagion affect when we see other people doing it. You know, it increases our likelihood of doing it. And clearly we know from the cognitive psychology research that, you know, multi-tasking is actually not possible. Humans can’t do two activities at once. They can task switch quickly, but they really can only do one at a time. So when people are multi-tasking, they’re inherently not present and that is not going to benefit the quality of the meeting. So multi-tasking is certainly problematic to the meeting itself. And then –

ALISON BEARD: So do you just take away people’s phones and laptops or tell them to leave them at their desks?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Okay. So how do you solve this problem? To me, I want to take a positive strategy first. Making sure that you have a highly compelling agenda, that you have invited highly relevant people. Right? If you have a highly compelling agenda and the right people and you run the meeting highly active, you can’t multi-task. So force multi-tasking out by having a super compelling meeting.

ALISON BEARD: Basically everyone has to be involved and pay attention.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Right. I mean, if I’m facilitating, if I’m actively calling folks out, if I’m saying, hey Sasha, I’d love to hear from you on this, you know, Gordon, are you aligned with this, right? So if I’m, if I’m actively facilitating, people aren’t going to multi-task.

ALISON BEARD: Right. That sounds to me like those, that sounds to me like those classes in college where you were always terrified of being cold called by the professor.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Right. Yes. I am one of those professors, mind you. But then you do have, like, the President Obama strategy. So, President Obama was, you know, for his cabinet meetings it was fairly typical that he didn’t allow people to multi-task. People put their phones in a basket and they had the meeting free of technology.

And I, I think there’s merits to that, but there are some kind of important rules of thumb when doing it. So if you’re going to ask people to check their phones, you need to make sure that the meeting is on the shorter side or you build in a break.

You know, basically there’s too much technology addiction. If you ask someone to stay away from their phone for an hour, I mean, they get the shakes. It’s really hard for them. So if our meetings are 30 minutes, I think people are much more willing to go on that journey with you but if the meeting is going to be longer than that, what I suggest is build in a quick 3-minute break in the middle, you know, where folks can, you know, you know, quickly check in on their, on their other activities and then get back to the meeting. And then, you know, clearly if you’re asking people to check their technology, there’s more pressure on you to make sure this meeting is going to be highly compelling.

ALISON BEARD: So that’s a nice segue to talking about virtual meetings which, obviously, are on the rise, you know, globalization, people working remotely more often. You know, I personally find conference calls to be absolute torture because you can barely hear what people are saying when you’re not in the room.

Video calls are even worse from my perspective because you have to be on camera. So what research do you have on how to make those meetings that are synchronous but are going through phones and computers better?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Yes. Good. So first I’ll, I’ll share with you a very telling research finding. So in surveys and interviews that have been conducted, when you ask people what is the least effective meeting modality, they will typically say the remote meeting. If you ask people what is their preferred meeting modality, they will often say the remote meeting. Right? Because they can multi-task.

And that says so much. Right? That this is so dysfunctional and so people just want to have the opportunity to be doing other things. But there is a path forward. Remote meetings, while dysfunctional, can be made better.

So first of all, we want to do anything we can to create presence that, you know, where people just don’t blend into the background. So one of the first, you know, first things that we want to focus on is trying to default to video as opposed to just audio only. The more cues there are, the more likely that someone will actively, you know, kind of be present. So try to default to video.

Then make it normative that people arrive five minutes early to the remote meeting so that all technology issues are addressed before the meeting starts. And once you decide on a technology platform that works for you, never switch. Don’t introduce any new technology, get, once you get that old one to work.

Then the meeting leader has to be really dialed in to the dynamics. They have to recognize that they have to be an air traffic controller, that they are constantly, they’re even recording who is talking and who is not talking. They are using names all the time. Even if people are present with them in the room, they are calling out people by name.

And this, this is a little bit more controversial, I even like this idea that, with remote meetings there’s almost an, that there potentially is the opportunity to ban the mute button. And I know that sounds crazy and, but if you think about it, the mute button is an excuse for people to not be present. The mute button often results in people eating their lunch, taking their dog on a walk; all things that distract from the meeting itself.

ALISON BEARD: Right. Can I give my tip for multi-tasking without the mute button on a conference call?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Oh, I’m scared to hear this.

ALISON BEARD: You fold laundry. You fold laundry. You don’t have to think about it at all, and it’s completely silent and then you get an important household task done while you’re listening and participating.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: I like it.

ALISON BEARD: And participating.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: I like it. So the problem could be that, with 55 million meetings, that’s a lot of laundry that you will need to fold but I like it.

ALISON BEARD: You mentioned purpose earlier and that does seem like a very critical thing to figure out. You know, if you’re brainstorming, the goal is to come away with ideas. If you’re trying to make a decision, you want to do that as a group. But then if you’re just informing, a lot of the literature on this says it should just be an email or a memo. So how should managers think about setting goals for their meetings and actually executing on them?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: So most meetings tend to have blended purposes. So you noted kind of an informational meeting. If the majority of the meeting is going to be simply one-way communication, then I really do challenge the leader to conduct the meeting differently or to not have the meeting.

But ideally, if you’re going to have a meeting, it’s because you hope there’s going to be some level of interaction. That’s what you’re trying to do. That’s why you’re making it this collective experience. If you really want discussion, this is where you have to be dialed in to meeting size and the relevance of the attendees and even thinking about some alternative approaches. So for example, you know, silence can be leverage in meetings to lead to lots, lots more interaction and productivity.

ALISON BEARD: So you mentioned agendas before and said that they don’t often work. How can we make them better?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: All right. When you think about it, agendas in and of themselves are not improving meetings because so many times, agendas are just recycled meeting to meeting. You know, what matters more is what’s on the agenda. Right? Is it really relevant to the people that are there? Did you ask people for their input on what to be, what’s on the agenda? And, you know, how did you facilitate that agenda? Right? Did you, did you truly create an inclusive environment?

You know, you can be much more strategic with agendas. When you look at agendas, they’re typically framed as a set of topics to be addressed. What I want to challenge meeting leaders to do sometimes is to try to create their agendas as a set of questions to be answered. By creating your agendas as a set of questions to be answered, you tend to engage in much deeper thought. You, you just can’t help it because it’s a more cognitive activity.

So you identify what are the questions to be answered. Also by doing this, you have a much better sense of truly who needs to be there. Right? Their relevant to those questions. You know when to end the meeting because the questions have been answered. You know if the meeting is successful because the questions have been answered in a compelling way. And if you just can’t think of any questions, that’s likely your indication that a meeting is not needed.

ALISON BEARD: Are there any rules of thumb on how many people you need for specific types of meetings?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: So there are general guidelines but, you know, the science doesn’t necessarily prove it out. We do know that the larger a meeting is, the more dysfunction tends to seep in. We know that the larger a meeting is, that people tend to engage in social loafing which is the idea that we reduce our efforts in the presence of others.

There is certainly some literature that talks about that if you’re going to have a discussion meeting, it needs to be less than eight people and I think there’s a lot of merit to that. Someone who is an, a phenomenal facilitator could certainly go beyond eight. If someone is willing to leverage some alternative tools like, for example, there are some wonderful apps out there that allow people to vote quickly. Right? So you can truly test consensus. Right? There are some wonderful apps out there that allow people to enter input silently and, you know, in a synchronous way so that, in a sense, lots of people are talking at once and the content is being displayed. Right? So if you’re going to leverage some of these alternative formats, I think you can go a little bit bigger but really, if you want discourse to be, and you’re not a trained facilitator, then typically it needs to be, you know, less than eight folks.

ALISON BEARD: Right. I mean, one problem that you see so often, especially with busy executives, is the back-to-back meeting phenomenon where you really never have any time to sit down at your desk, do your own critical thinking, finish tasks that sort of require you to work on your own. Basically there’s no time for non-collaborative work. You know? So how do you solve that problem?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Yeah, and it really is a problem. So this thinking that only creative, you know, engineers and folks like that need uninterrupted time, I don’t buy it. I absolutely believe that all leaders need uninterrupted time to think, you know, to be proactive and strategic and not just be reactionary.

So first of all, and I think this is happening in many organizations but I’d love to see it more formalized, is that they agree to create some windows of meeting-free time. So one organizations that I, one organization that I’ve worked with, you know, has this concept of, finish it Friday, and so they leave Friday afternoons as meeting-free so people can have that time. I, when, you know, leaders that I talk about, I love when they take their meetings and they stick them before lunch and after lunch and they kind of, you know, put them in that block but then their mornings and, you know, kind of mid, late afternoons are more free for them to kind of engage in that creative thought, and I think these things are realistic.

So despite the fact that leaders obviously have to have lots of meetings, they can change kind of their meeting cadences. Right? They don’t have to have long meetings. Right? If they start creating new defaults, right, so in their one-on-one meetings if they say, okay, one-on-one meetings are now going to be no longer than 15 or 20 minutes, right, you can fit in a lot more.

And we know from the research that, you know, work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. It’s called Parkinson’s law. And this is, explains why an hour-long meeting, you know, scheduled for an hour, always takes an hour because that work will expand. But we can actually use this to our advantage. If we schedule a meeting for 15 or 20 minutes, we’re going to get stuff done in that 15 to 20 minutes.

I just love the idea of these meeting leaders saying, okay, I want to be deliberate in the type of meeting cadences and the meeting approaches that I will take to elevate my team and my organization.

ALISON BEARD: Let’s talk about what you do when you have everyone gathered. How do you make sure that they’re excited to come in and take themselves away from the thing that they actually need to get done at their own desk?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Yeah.

ALISON BEARD: And don’t say bring donuts.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Well, I mean, bringing, bringing a snack is not a bad idea by the way. You know, one of the predicters of meeting satisfaction tends to be snacks.

ALISON BEARD: Right.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: And it’s not the snacks in and of themselves, right, but what snacks communicate. But what we want to do is recognize that meetings are typically experienced as interruptions. Right? They’re taking someone away from what they were previously doing and perhaps wanting to do.

So when people have interruptions, they tend to kind of be in a negative mood. So as a leader, we need to recognize and embrace our role as a host. Right? We have called this meeting, we truly are a host. We send out invites and people arrive at our request. A host, when people come in the room, the host is on top of welcoming people. They’re thanking them for coming. Right?

They’re expressing gratitude and appreciation. They’re starting to, you know, they’re trying to start that meeting on the right foot. And if they notice that, you know, maybe a couple people don’t know each other, the host is making introductions. Right? They’re helping people feel comfortable. And so they’re starting their meeting off well and they’re not starting their meeting off grousing and saying, oh another meeting and, oh, you know, just what you all wanted, another meeting. Right?

So they’re starting it trying to be positive because this idea, you know, what we, I mean, what the research, it’s really pretty powerful is that the best predicter of kind of collective mood state is the leader’s mood. So that energy that a meeting leader brings in is contagious. And I’m not at all saying that that meeting leader, you know, needs to be fake and that the meetings have to be about only positive things. I don’t believe that at all but even if there’s a really meaningful problem or challenge to be addressed, you could still be kind of positive about it. Right? We have an opportunity, we have an important problem and we’ve gathered together to work together to address this important problem. Right? That’s different and that will feel different.

ALISON BEARD: Another example that you gave was sort of bringing the pre-reading for a meeting into the actual meeting so that people can catch up and all be on the same page.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Yes. So that’s kind of an Amazon approach. What we know is that people are having so much work activity and so many meetings that this idea of everyone getting through the pre-reads before the meeting might not be all that realistic.

And this is problematic because when people haven’t done the pre-reads, they often don’t admit it. Instead, they fake it which is not all that helpful. So an Amazon practice is, they actually build in pre-read time into the meeting itself. So let’s say the first 10 to 15 minutes, people are reading the materials and then, bang, there’s an active discussion about, you know, the meeting topics on the table.

ALISON BEARD: So we’ve talked about what individual leaders can do and a bit about what organizations can do. Can individual leaders who want to change the way meetings work in their organization get together and push for this kind of change?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: So can there be a rebellion? It’s kind of what you’re describing.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: I think that, you know, more and more organizations, I think, are recognizing that bad meetings don’t have to be a way of life, a way of life and they’re looking to make changes. So I’m hoping that the rebellion might not be needed because organizations are getting on board. You know? But with that said, you know, what I want, what I tell meeting leaders is that while you can’t control other meetings, other leaders and other kind of meeting leaders, you can control your meetings. Right? You can make different choices. You can make your meetings better. You could start to be the example.

And I even think that there’s, you know, things that you can do to develop better meeting leaders from people who report into you. So for example, let’s say you’re constructing your agenda. You don’t need to personally own every agenda item. You could start assigning agenda items to others. Let them handle that agenda item and then you could provide feedback afterwards to help them become better meeting leaders in the future.

ALISON BEARD: That makes sense. What about the attendees? Can they have any agency here, you know, if I’m experiencing bad meetings, is there anything that I can do about it?

STEVEN ROGELBERG: I get asked this question and it makes me really sad to answer because there’s, there’s actually very little that you can do as a meeting attendee. We really do relinquish so much of our power when we walk into a meeting room. You know, the only thing that we have at our disposal is to model the types of attendee behaviors that you hope others would do. B, you can potentially engage in some shadow facilitation, right, where, you know, you can be saying things like, you know, you know, Dave, I haven’t heard from you, you know, David, what do you think about this? And so you can kind of be engaging in some of these behaviors that, that hopefully will become, you know, more normative.

ALISON BEARD: Right. And just boycott bad meeting.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: Hopefully. Or at least or, you know, or at least buy a copy of my book and put it in your boss’s mailbox.

ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Thank you. Hopefully we will all be better meeting leaders after listening to this episode. I appreciate you coming on the show.

STEVEN ROGELBERG: My pleasure.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Steven Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He’s the author of the book, The Surprising Science Of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team To Peak Performance, and the HBR article, “Why Your Meetings Stink and What To Do About It.”

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.