Are you a Warren or an Oprah?
“Meetings are a bug, today we shipped a fix to this bug @shopify. To start 2023 we are canceling all meetings with more than 2 people”. So wrote Kaz Nejatian, the Canadian company’s chief operating officer as he explained “we will delete nearly 10,000 events which equates to 76,500 hours of meetings”.
Shopify may have grabbed some headlines with its dramatic purge, but Kaz is far from alone in worrying about the effectiveness of meetings. Research from the US suggests that of the 55 million meetings that happen there every day, participants think that while 50% of the time is spent on engaging and impactful work, 50% is not. Knowingly wasting half our time seems a strange business decision.
For a while, in order to become a credible and exciting new startup, you had to have a hot new take on how to run a meeting. There have been companies who only have stand up meetings, companies that have meetings while going for a walk, companies that start meetings with a quiz - the list goes on.
Like everyone, I have been in some hilarious meetings, some meetings that have made me want to scream and some I have left feeling elated and productive. When I first started working I was a very junior strategy consultant in a new consulting company, Spectrum. I was sent to work on a project for Samsung based in Seoul for six months. I was working in a basement room of a huge high rise block as part of a large local team. Every day started with a company wide Samsung meeting- it was broadcast on a vast screen and ended with a rendition of the company song. The big boss would then remind his workers to work ‘in the Samsung way’ by catching on video an employee who was not following this philosophy. It felt pretty clear that if it was you on the video, you should pack your bags and leave immediately. Starting the day with this veiled threat added immense tension to the first few hours of the morning, but rather than inspiring the team to be as productive as possible, it had the opposite effect and as soon as the song was over, feet went up on desks and chain smoking began, everyone relieved they still had a job.
Meetings are a constant topic of management gurus, productivity experts and executive coaches, but are we any closer in understanding how to get them right?
Taking insight from some of the world's most successful and focused business leaders, there are areas of consensus. Curtailing the number of people in the room does seem to be one. From Jeff Bezos’s two pizza rule - that every team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas - to Steve Jobs “only invite the important people”, meetings function best when there are fewer participants. Science bears this out - multiple studies have found six or fewer is ideal for peak performance. Stanford University research showed the more inclusive managers tried to be by involving more people in meetings, the more the quality of outcomes declined. Reassuring therefore to know that most boards, all cabinet meetings and the bulk of intergovernmental interactions are not designed for success.
Strict agendas and ruthless time keeping also seems to unite top bosses. Sheryl Sandberg, until recently number 2 at Facebook, relied on a trusty spiral notebook in which she wrote all the discussion points for each meeting. When each point was crossed off, the meeting was over - even if it only lasted a few minutes. I like thirty minute meetings - not defaulting to an hour is never a mistake in my experience. Digital Calendar settings have a lot to answer for with their automatic hour slots.
You could go more extreme and follow Warren Buffett's lead. He doesn't like scheduled meetings at all. He won’t commit to anything more than 24 hours in advance. I love this in many ways - you don’t get trapped in a strict schedule. But it's hard to do, especially in larger organizations where you might not be in charge of all the moving parts. I run my own diary and it does make a big difference to prioritization and planning, but then again, I have the luxury of a more flexible working life.
And let’s not forget Oprah Winfrey, media tycoon, who goes further again and doesn’t have meetings at all. She prefers long memos and if necessary, phone calls. She does seem to make an exception for on screen meetings of course. Perhaps a more moderate version is useful. I always try to say yes to a short virtual meeting if someone wants to introduce themselves or their service or idea. In this new hybrid world, you definitely don't need ro commit to meeting face to face as you would have done in the past.
Setting the tone and atmosphere is as important as the agenda and timing - saying hello to everyone, introducing yourself to people you don't know, being friendly. These niceties seem obvious but they rarely happen in my experience - especially on zoom. I am sure you have been in hybrid meetings where everyone is awkwardly waiting for the chair to start talking.
There isn’t a definitive meeting rule book and if there was it certainly shouldn’t be set by Microsoft Outlook, Shopify or even Bezos. I think the only answer is to try to feel freer about how you plan and run them. Try to turn meetings from a “bug” to a butterfly.