Evidence-based ways to make our meetings better

You want to make your meetings better?

First, stop reading those repetitive Business Insider listicles by anonymous, uncredentialed writers, and pick up a book by Steven G. Rogelberg. The book—excuse its over-excited title—is The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. A nifty overview of Rogelberg’s work, this book offers the most well-researched and in-depth coverage of—you guessed it!—evidence-based ways you can have more effective, enjoyable meetings. Here’s a few nuggets I gleaned from Rogelberg’s book, which I’m exploring how to utilize for my meetings.

Recognize your shortcomings as a meeting leader.

First off, we should all admit that our meetings have some room for improvement. How much?

Conducting research, Rogelberg suggests, is the best way for us to find out, and understand whether or not our meetings are successful or not. In the book, he shares examples of surveys that meeting leaders can distribute to attendees to develop a more objective perception.

Why bother with the research?

Illusory superiority. Also known as the Lake Wobegon effect, this cognitive bias causes us to overestimate our own skills and abilities. In the case of meeting leaders—see where this is going?—we tend to think that our meetings were great when they were good and just fine when they were downright bad. (Though I have left a meeting, head hung in shame, downtrodden at my poor stewardship.)

To make matters even worse, Rogelberg alludes to multiple studies he’s conducted that confirm meeting leaders are subject to self-sabotaging illusory superiority:

In multiple studies my colleagues and I conducted, we found that meeting leaders consistently rated their meetings more favorably than non-leaders. […] [W]e found that the amount of participation or involvement in meetings correlated positively with perceptions of meeting effectiveness and satisfaction. In other words, if you talk a lot, you are more likely to think the meeting experience was a good one. Well, guess who typically talks the most in meetings? The leader.

He drives this point further home by referring to a survey of 1,300 meeting-goers in which 79% of respondents rated their own meetings as “extremely or very productive,” while only 56% described meetings run by their peers in such glowing terms.

Clearly, we have some bias when it comes to our meetings.

Don’t let length be an afterthought.

Time is a universal topic of complaint about meetings—meetings that run over and meetings that run too long. When was the last time you were in a meeting where the length of it was, to borrow from Goldilocks, just right?

Why is this? Most meeting organizers don’t think too hard about meeting length. I indict myself here as well: I create a new meeting invite, add participants, scoot over to the “Scheduler,” eyeball an open hour next Tuesday morning, and—BAM!—we’ve got ourselves a meeting.

Rogelberg counsels more deliberation when it comes to setting meeting length. He asks us to especially be aware of the jokey (but very real) “Parkinson’s law,” which states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” (Wikipedia). As Rogelberg applies it to meetings, “the work of a meeting generally expands to fill whatever time [we allot to it].”

If we want more effective meetings, we should be more intentional about scheduling them. How long do you really need to make that go/no-go decision? How much time will it take to have a discussion on next month’s PR strategy?

Don’t allow technology dictate meeting length.

Here’s another thing I’m guilty of: using the default meeting length as prescribed by our calendar tools.

If you live in Outlook like me, your default calendar breaks the day into 30-minute blocks. This means that when you create a new meeting, Outlook assumes that meeting will be 30 minutes long. Obviously, reliance on the default settings feeds the problem described above; Outlook will not help you align meeting length with topic. The other issue with this “autopilot” approach to scheduling meetings is that it provides no breather between back-to-back meetings.

Our turn to remote work has only intensified the temptation to book back-to-back meetings. In an office setting, it’s unreasonable to book three meetings back-to-back—you’d be breathlessly running from conference room to conference room. But if you’re sitting at the same desk, calling in, “meeting-stacking” feels reasonable, even efficient.

But it’s not.

Meeting-stacking is exhausting, disorganized, and ineffective. Rather than jumping from call to call, what if you had a few minutes between each meeting to collect yourself, take notes, shoot off a quick email, go to the bathroom, or review the agenda for the next meeting? Doesn’t that sound nice?

One of my colleagues often talks about how a good meeting organizer will always strive to “give time back to your day,” attempting to bring a meeting to a close 5-10 minutes before the scheduled end. But why not integrate an early end to the meeting into the meeting invite itself?

While it wasn’t always the case, Outlook now has an available setting—it’s not the default, sadly; you will need to hunt for it—where you can reset default meeting invites to end five minutes early for meetings 30 minutes or fewer, and 10 minutes early for meetings 30 minutes or longer. That means that your 15-minute stand-up is now a crisp 10 minutes, and your hour-long department meeting now runs from 9:00-9:50 AM instead of straight to 10 AM.

Build more thoughtful agendas.

The title of Rogelberg’s chapter on meeting agendas tells you (almost) all you need to know: “Agendas Are a Hollow Crutch.”

He points out that many regard agendas as a quick fix for their meeting problems. (I count myself as formerly among this number.) Rogelberg’s research, however, demonstrates that a written agenda has little, if any, impact on attendees’ perceptions of the meeting’s effectiveness.

According to him, an agenda is not enough. In what seems like a crazy analogy at first, he compares meetings to weddings:

Planning a Wedding Meeting

An agenda is an event plan. When planning an event, we think carefully about the details, the flow, the experience, and the approach. The same mindset and process should occur when planning a meeting. In fact, the notion of thinking of a meeting as an event is really not a stretch. It is not unusual for a meeting to cost between $1,000 and $3,000 in attendee time and salaries, which many would likely say is a fairly expensive event warranting careful planning. (strikethrough emphasis is Rogelberg’s)

Essentially, Rogelberg advises us to consider the agenda as a means to the end of a thoughtful and productive meeting, not as an end in and of itself. Too often, we dash off a quick list of bullets to our colleagues in advance of a meeting and consider ourselves prepared.

Keep your meetings small

How many people actually need to be in this meeting?

More than once, I’ve looked around a meeting and wondered what someone was doing there. Even worse, I’ve looked around a meeting and wondered what I am doing there! When a meeting organizer is overly generous with invites—You get an invite, and you get an invite, and you get an invite!—you end up with big, bloated meetings where not everyone understands their role in a meeting, and how they are meant to participate.

I think we all know in our guts that these large meetings aren’t effective, but Rogelberg validtes this hunch, has done the legwork to prove that they aren’t effective, citing research that found “for each additional person over seven members in a decision-making group, decision effectiveness is reduced by approximately 10 percent.”

So, keep those meetings to seven members or fewer if you want to have a shot at getting something done!

As for how to decide on those seven members, Rogelberg proposes a series of questions that every meeting organizer should ask:

1. Who has the information and knowledge about the topic in question?
2. Who are the key decision makers and important stakeholders relevant to the issue?
3. Who are the people who need the information that is going to be discussed?
4. Who are the people who will implement any decision or act on the issue?

After issuing this dictum, he does acknowledge two common reasons for our bloated meetings: people like being invited to meetings (it makes us feel important!) and—the opposite reason—people don’t like not being invited to meetings (it makes us feel unimportant).

What to do? Rogelberg’s advice boils down to transparency: be open about your invites. If you suspect that someone will be hurt for not being included, then reach out to them and explain your reasoning. (Rogelberg’s analogy of meetings to weddings obviously falters here, but that’s okay!)

Consider silence

One of the most powerful observations in the book is that meeting organizers assume that the current mode of meetings is the only way, but the reality is that it’s just our default:

Effective meeting leaders recognize that they are orchestrating and designing a meeting experience when they bring folks together. They are stewards of others’ time and, as a result, must plan diligently. When all participants arrive at the same time and work interactively on a task—a typical meeting style that takes place millions of times a day—leaders are actually deciding to use a tool. Let’s give this tool a hypothetical name: the simultaneous verbal interaction technique (aka the SVIT). Quite the wordy name and a horrible acronym, yes, but it helps to make the point that a choice has been made to use a particular meeting technique, without even recognizing it. […] The SVIT is the most conventional meeting tool of choice. We typically default to it. However, many other compelling tools exist. The more unconventional tools, like brainwriting and silent reading, represent essential alternative options available to meeting leaders as they consider their meeting goals.

I can’t overstate how revelatory this idea should be to all meeting leaders. Get people in a room, discuss items on an agenda, and make some decisions through verbal consensus? This is not the only way to conduct a meeting.

The two other tools Rogelberg mentions in this section—silent reading and brainwriting—are arguably more effective alternates to similar processes conducted in a “SVIT.” Both are unusual in that they require silence, not something that people are accustomed to in meeting situations.

Silent reading offers a time-efficient replacement for in-meeting presentations (people digest the same information faster by reading than listening to someone else present it), and also ensures that everyone (pardon the pun) is the on same page prior to a discussion. Ever send out a piece of critical information, like an RFP, prior to a meeting only to find that half of your attendees—who need to offer their opinions on it!—have not so much as cracked it open?

That scenario happens often enough to me that recently, having just finished Rogelberg’s book, I decided to see what the tool would look like in action. So, tasked with the challenge of discussing a new draft of some standard marketing boilerplate with my firm’s sales group, I set a timer and told the 12 attendees (too big, I know…) that they would have five minutes to read the draft and that we would discuss afterwards. The subsequent well-informed discussion was successful enough that two attendees separately commented to me afterwards that silent reading was something they would look to implement in their own meetings!

Brainwriting offers a silent replacement to the much-attempted and infrequently successful tactic of brainstorming. (I could probably write a separate post cataloguing my many failed brainstorming sessions.) Instead of a verbal “storm” of ideas, where two or three participants typically dominate the discussion, brainwriting imposes silence and asks participants to jot down their ideas. The genius of brainwriting is that it not only helps avoid groupthink, it also results in more and higher quality ideas, because it allows participants to think in parallel (back to the efficiency of reading/writing over speaking) and effectively removes the social cues that prioritize agreeable ideas over contrary and potentially more effective ones.