The Surprising Science of Meetings

by Steven G Rogelberg

  Decreasing Meeting Times Thoughtfully

  Thomas J. Watson, founder of IBM, posted a simple slogan throughout company offices that read: “Think.” This simple rule of thumb can have endless applications for managers. One of these applications is in the determining of meeting times: with a given set of meeting goals, how much time is really needed to complete them? A meeting leader should take a minute to think and make an informed guess based on some key factors: the nature of the meeting’s goals, the people invited to the meeting (discussed in a later chapter), and an analysis of past meetings. The same leader can also, at times, ask others for input and thoughtfully use that feedback, which only serves to engender attendee buy-in to time limits once they have been established. After considering these variables, don’t be wary of scheduling meetings with odd lengths. For example, a forty-eight-minute meeting is just fine if that is the right fit. These odd times attract attention and curiosity and may even be a little fun. The survey research company TINYpulse, for example, starts a daily staff meeting at 8:48 a.m. Not only does this practice raise eyebrows because of its uniqueness, but also, as an added bonus, TINYpulse reports almost zero tardiness to these meetings.

  Once a good time estimate is generated, consider dropping it by 5–10 percent. A little bit of pressure can often serve a meeting well. The Yerkes–Dodson law, which maps the relationship between stress and performance, is well established in psychological research. This relationship is one of an inverted U.

  Namely, performance is optimal when some level of stress exists, and performance is lowest in the absence of stress, as well as when there is an abundance of stress. This pattern of findings exists for both individual and team performance, across both work and sports contexts. So, by dropping 5–10 percent off the well-considered estimate, you are potentially introducing a healthy amount of stress, which promotes task-related focus, stimulation, energy, and engagement. If you typically have a sixty-minute meeting, push it down to fifty minutes if that seems doable. If you typically have a thirty-minute meeting, push it down to twenty-five minutes. This clearly works to counter some of the negative effects of Parkinson’s law. Plus it saves time, which compounds across participants. Finally, slightly decreasing meeting length has an added benefit of helping with transitions between meetings.

  As we saw in Chapter 1, it is not atypical to have back-to-back meetings. Without any type of transition time, the chance of meeting lateness increases. My colleagues and I have conducted a host of studies on meeting lateness and we’ve learned that meetings seem to start late around 50 percent of the time. Meeting lateness by and large leads to frustration among those who are not late. Most worrisome, this frustration appears to spill over into the meeting itself. For example, we observed that when meetings started ten minutes late, besides creating frustration, members were more likely to interrupt one another throughout the meeting. Taken together, it is not surprising that meetings that started late resulted in lower-quality outcomes such as fewer new ideas and fewer good ideas.

  Dropping five to ten minutes off the meeting length allows for transition time and helps mitigate future meeting lateness. While transition times are typical in school settings, Google may be responsible for starting this trend in corporate settings. At the very least, Google has given the practice a great deal of momentum. Larry Page, Google’s cofounder and former CEO, returned to the company in April 2011. In one of his first memos to employees, he argued that hour-long meetings must allow for a bathroom break in between. This started the fifty/twenty-five rule I described earlier: one-hour meetings shortened to fifty minutes, and thirty-minute meetings shortened to twenty-five minutes. Since that time, this rule has been adopted by a host of companies across industries. One employee from PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) whom I interviewed told me that the company implemented a campaign initiative called “PwC has gone Google.” “There was definitely more of an attitude of ‘let’s try to have a fifty-minute meeting,’” she said. The employee continued, “Also, I personally felt (and noticed others do this too) that I could legitimately excuse myself at the fifty-minute mark when I needed to travel to another meeting/prep for the other meeting, etc.”

  If you are interested in exploring this strategy, here is some good news: Google is making these speedier meetings easier than ever for non-Googlers to carry out. Now when you use the Google Calendar application, you can go into settings and actually change the default meeting length. There is a toggle switch for “speedy meetings” with a description reading, “encourage meeting efficiency and get to your next meeting on time.” New meeting requests will then default to twenty-five- or fifty-minute increments. Although scheduling in this fashion will indeed speed up the meeting, I am also enthusiastic about a new concept bubbling up in more and more organizations—the super-speedy meeting.

  The Super-Speedy Meeting

  A ten- or fifteen-minute meeting is another tool for a leader to consider. These types of meetings are quite common in high-stakes workplaces like military, emergency (e.g., fire departments), and hospital settings. In these environments, short meetings are often used to debrief or actively reflect on an event or occurrence like an accident (e.g., what worked and what didn’t work and why). The research on these types of meetings is enthusiastically supportive of their ability to enhance future individual and team performance and the safety behaviors of attendees. Short meetings with a focused agenda, facilitated effectively, can have tremendously positive effects. Plus, these short meetings align with research on limited human attention spans and fatigue.

  Short meetings are spreading among companies quite rapidly. Percolate, a global technology firm, has set their default length for meetings at fifteen minutes. While they may adjust it up or down, they are committed to making fifteen minutes the typical meeting time. Similarly, Marissa Mayer, formerly a senior executive at Google and president/CEO of Yahoo, was famous for her short meetings. She would create large time blocks filled with ten-minute meeting windows. While this would often result in seventy meetings per week for her, this practice allowed her to be highly responsive to employee needs, it made getting a meeting on her calendar much easier, and it helped projects and initiatives to keep pushing forward without delays. She also claimed that by limiting the meetings to ten minutes, employees came in with a tight and highly focused agenda that promoted success. Highly focused and short are also the hallmarks of a final type of short meeting I want to profile: the huddle.

  In sports, a huddle is a common activity that may be planned or spontaneous and that occurs before or after an action. At RSC Bio Solutions, a company whose practices we looked at in Chapter 3, the huddle is a gathering of the team to strategize, discuss, monitor, motivate, or celebrate. The concept of the huddle is being applied more than ever in a range of organizations, from Apple, to Dell, to Zappos, to Ritz Carlton, to Capital One. It was also used in the Obama White House. Logistically, a huddle in the business realm typically:

  • Is ten or fifteen minutes in length

  • Occurs at the same time each day (or every other day)

  • Starts and ends on time

  • Is done in the morning

  • Occurs in the same place

  • Involves the same people

  • Mandates perfect attendance: if folks can’t attend in person, they attend remotely

  • Occurs standing up, if possible

  Although each leader (or other attendees if serving in the role of facilitator) can customize a huddle according to the needs of the organization and team, it is often the case that one question from one or more of the following categories is used:

  What Has Happened and Any Key Wins

  • What did you accomplish since yesterday?

  • What did you finish since yesterday?

  • Any key wins for you or the team that you can share?

  • Any key client updates?

  What Will Happen

  • What are you working on today?

  �
�� What is your top priority for the day?

  • What is the one most important thing you will get done today?

  • What are your top three priorities for the day or the week?

  Key Metrics

  • How are we doing on our company’s top three metrics?

  • How are we doing on your team’s top three metrics?

  Obstacles

  • What obstacles are impeding your progress?

  • Any “stuck points” you are facing?

  • Any roadblocks the team can help with?

  • Anything slowing down your progress?

  You can also tailor your questions on the basis of emergent priorities and needs. For example, a company I worked with was trying to promote more cross-departmental teamwork. Thus, each week, one huddle was designed to explicitly align with that goal. This took a few different forms. For example, attendees might discuss roadblocks, such as work processes that may be hurting teamwork. Or, they may focus on the positive and ask attendees for examples of how others helped them and displayed teamwork. Or, they may ask each attendee to specify an emergent need he or she needs help with. Taken together, the organization was able to reinforce the current initiative and even monitor progress.

  When you implement the huddle, all attendees should quickly answer all questions posed by the facilitator, unless of course there are extenuating circumstances. The meeting leader should make it clear that employees’ answers should be succinct, to promote efficiency. It is also important for the meeting leader to stress that the huddle is not about reporting to the leader (this can be emphasized by rotating facilitator responsibilities). Instead, the huddle is about the team members communicating with one another, pulling together, learning together, and seeking ways to support each other. Relatedly, given the tight time limits of huddles, it is important to recognize that huddles are often about setting the table for additional conversations between team members offline. While quick suggestions and guidance can be shared during the huddle from attendee to attendee, if the issue involves a small subset of attendees, they can continue the conversation after the huddle is done. In fact, the walk to and from the huddle often turns out to be a rich opportunity for communication. Or, if the issue is substantive and involves most of the attendees, this issue can be taken up in a separate meeting.

  Inc. magazine did a nice feature in 2007 called “The Art of the Huddle,” highlighting how various leaders are leveraging their huddles. Let me share a couple of examples they profiled.

  Bishop-Wisecarver, a $20 million maker of machine components

  Huddles were initiated to improve communication across silos and departments (people were not talking enough to one another). The CEO reports that teamwork improved greatly once information sharing in huddles became routine. She indicates that snafus have been averted, with different managers making adjustments and offering support as they learned about issues and challenges in other departments.

  Advanced Facilities Services, a $10 million facilities management company

  The CEO initiated huddles with his top managers to keep all of them focused on strategic long-term issues. Each manger takes less than a minute to indicate what he or she will do to advance the quarterly and yearly goals, progress made the previous day, and roadblocks being encountered. These conversations keep the team moving forward and allow the CEO to see if someone is off course or if any misunderstandings are occurring.

  Overall, huddles promote a sense of unity, facilitate coordination, get needed information out there quickly, enable problem-solving, promote accountability, reveal blind spots, sharpen collective focus, foster action, promote better communication, enhance understanding of goals, and stimulate attendees to help one another achieve success.

  Short Meetings Come with a Few Warnings

  One worry often associated with the daily huddle is that people are just too busy to engage in this practice (e.g., they find it hard to find time on a daily basis for something like this). I can certainly see where this is coming from: if you are swamped with work, finding time to meet frequently is a genuine challenge. From my experience implementing huddles at organizations and examining data on their effectiveness, however, they are actually small-time investments yielding big returns. By improving coordination and communication among the members of a team, time is ultimately saved in the form of less rework, more teamwork, more support, and fewer miscommunications that need to be resolved. That being said, there are two important hazards to actively guard against when engaging in these practices.

  The first hazard is creating yet more time spent in meetings. Shorter meetings are designed to replace some longer meetings. In other words, the hope is that some current longer meetings can be dropped as a result of these frequent and effective huddles. Keeping that in mind, it is certainly acceptable and appropriate to schedule additional meetings in response to topics that emerge in huddles and topics that are not completely discussed. One organization I know instituted something called “magic time.” Basically, this was a standing meeting hour that the team kept open, no matter what, every other week (e.g., every other Monday at 10 a.m.); if a critical issue emerged in a huddle that needed substantive discussion (e.g., a key manufacturing challenge), all team members knew that this time was available for follow-up. Thus, the huddle did not run over the scheduled end time, which brings us to the second hazard.

  A second key hazard to avoid is not honoring the shorter meeting times. Running over the scheduled huddle end time is highly problematic. Our research suggests, in fact, that running late may have more negative consequences on attendees than starting late: it serves to negatively affect any scheduled activities post-meeting, and by ending late, the meeting is breaking an implicit time contract of sorts with attendees. Breaking this “contract” results in stress, dissatisfaction, and frustration among attendees, which not only affects them personally but also can spill over to how they interact with others. By honoring the end time, you work to mitigate these issues. Beyond this benefit, the increased sense of urgency from a short meeting, with a hard stop time, will decrease rambling and unproductive, off-topic conversation.

  A number of organizations take the practice of ending on time very seriously. Google often features a giant timer on the wall. The timer counts down the time remaining for a particular meeting or topic and is visible so that all know it and see it. O3 World, a design and product development agency, leverages technology they created, called Roombot, to keep meetings from ending late. This technology will warn attendees as the meeting’s end time approaches and will even start dimming the lights. Of course, there are effective interventions to keep meetings on track that are not so technologically advanced. Many companies tend to take a more humorous approach to getting meetings to end on time. At Tripping.com, the meeting leader must contribute to the team beer jar if the meeting does not end on time. Or, even more extreme, at Buddytruk, if the meeting runs over, the last person talking has to do fifty push-ups. It is clear that these companies recognize the benefits of ending on time, and recognize the importance of gaining buy-in from the attendees.

  To help you get started conducting huddles, a Huddle Implementation Checklist tool is provided at the end of the book.

  The Final Argument for Adding Short Meetings to Your Toolbox

  As we have seen, there are so many reasons to leverage shorter meetings. If you’re still not convinced, then try short meetings for your health. This is a bit of a leap, but there is a kernel of truth here. Research on physical meeting spaces was conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on behalf of the US Department of Energy. To no surprise, as people exhale, carbon dioxide readings in confined spaces like meeting rooms increase. Researchers found that exposure to carbon dioxide for extended periods of time actually resulted in a decrease of constructive meeting processes like taking initiative and thinking strategically. Granted, they found that these negative effects did not kick in until after two and a half hours, but
if you’re looking for a physiological rationale for shorter meetings, it’s there.

  Let me close this section with a final piece of advice right out of the Steve Jobs playbook, one that I firmly believe in. The meeting leader should never be afraid, no matter the length of a meeting, to end a meeting early: (1) when it looks as if the meeting goals have been met (no need to drag it out), or (2) when the attendees seem to be just spinning their wheels and are not being productive. In the case of the latter, sometimes just stopping and regrouping at a later time or using a different communication medium (e.g., email) can be just what is needed to ultimately turn a losing effort into a winning one.

  Takeaways

  1. Parkinson’s law states that work expands to whatever time is allotted. Keep this in mind with regard to meetings, and take the time to conscientiously choose the length of your meetings (based on the goals, agenda, attendees, etc.). Perhaps even consider a nontraditional meeting length or start time, like the forty-eight-minute meeting, to push the envelope.

  2. Consider shortening your regular meetings by five to ten minutes (instead of thirty or sixty minutes, try twenty-five or fifty). Not only will this create a little added pressure, which is shown to make attendees more effective, but also it will reduce lateness to meetings and allow for breaks between meetings.

  3. Consider the idea of implementing daily or weekly short meetings or huddles. These ten- to fifteen-minute meetings should have a focused agenda, involve lots of concise interaction among attendees, and be facilitated effectively using some of the key questions I have included in this chapter.