Why Meeting Bloat Happens

When are meetings the best way to coordinate and make decisions and when do they make things worse?? How do you use the two-pizza rule to hold effective meetings and what happens when you start including too many people in a process?

Rebecca Hinds is the head of the Work AI Institute at Glean and the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, a book outlining the way to address one of the ways productivity is lost in organizations.

Greg and Rebecca discuss the importance of intentionality in information flow within organizations, the common pitfalls of meeting culture, and practical strategies to improve meeting efficiency. Rebecca emphasizes the use of data and AI to measure meeting effectiveness and reduce 'meeting bloat', while sharing insights from her experiences at Asana and her studies on organizational collaboration. They also explore the evolving collaboration between HR and IT departments in the era of AI and the necessity for both tech and HR professionals to exchange and enhance their skills.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How ‘visibIlity bias’ fuels endless meetings

[07:28] We know that humans have a bias to associate presence with productivity. And so what I find to be often the case is people start to associate more meetings with more importance and status within the organization, and so when you're stuck and not sure how to make progress or you're worried about productivity, a meeting becomes a knee-jerk solution to solve that. You might not accomplish anything meaningful in the meeting, but at least you've sat together and shown that some progress or perceived progress was made. And so I think at the core of this, is this pervasive productivity theater that goes on in organizations, this visibility bias where we associate meetings with importance within the organization. There are a host of other problems, but at the core, I think that's the fundamental problem that we're dealing with.

The pressure ingrained in our calendars and meeting cultures

[09:37]  As soon as someone extends a meeting invite. They're establishing this social contract where you feel like you have to reciprocate. Even when we think about terminology around, it's a meeting invite. You either accept or you reject. You start to feel like you're not just rejecting the meeting, but rejecting the person. And it's taken very personally. 

AI tools can help reveal participation imbalances in meetings

[22:59] If you're seeing that leaders are consuming 70%, 80% of the airtime, that's an opportunity to course correct and improve your meeting effectiveness. And often when it comes from an AI tool or an objective analytic tool, it's much more effectively received than a less powerful person trying to voice that takeaway in the meeting and try to veer influence that way.

Are we socially conditioned to hate meetings?

[28:48] Humans have what I call a meeting suck reflex, right? For a multitude of different reasons.When we hear the word "meeting," we have this negative, visceral reaction. So much so that you know when you're asked to evaluate your meetings in public versus private, you tend to rate your meetings much more negatively when you're around people in public as compared to privately, because we think that we should hate meetings. We've been socially conditioned to feel such, and there's few things that bond coworkers more quickly than bonding over a bad meeting that could have been a five-line email, right? And so to avoid that, assessing whether a meeting was worth your time helps to level set. Everyone has an intuitive sense of whether a meeting was worth their time. Is there something more productive they could have done with that time or not? And so that tends to be a good gauge for you as an organizer.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Asana, Inc.
• Parkinson's law
• Steven Rogelberg
• Law of Triviality
• Amazon’s Two-Pizza Teams
• ROTI
• Robert I. Sutton

Guest Profile:

• RebeccaHinds.com
• The Work AI Institute at Glean
• LinkedIn Profile
• Social Profile on X for Glean

Guest Work:

• Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.