The Power of You to Truly Make Meetings Work | Steven Rogelberg | TEDxUNCCharlotte

[Music] [Applause] all right well it is a pleasure to be here who wants to talk about meetings so while we often don't like going to meetings talking about meetings is kind of fun so in keeping with the theme of this event I titled my conversation the power of you to make meetings truly work now given how much people tend to hate meetings I did think of an alternative title the power of you to make meetings less time sucking miserable dreaded annoying and wasteful but instead I chose a more optimistic title because I truly believe that by leveraging the science of meetings we can make meetings truly work alright so let me share with you some data about this crazy topic so first of all there are around 55 million meetings a day in the US alone most individuals have around 15 meetings a week but that time increases as we move up in organizations hierarchy and at the same time meetings as it has been identified as the number one time waster at work but this last stat is the most sobering over 70 percent of senior senior managers see meetings is unproductive but they're the ones calling the meetings so when you put this together a high base rate activity tons of meetings tons of frustration you could make the case that we are both living and dying in meetings but for me I saw as an opportunity as an organizational psychologist the thought of studying something and working to improve something that's making people miserable is actually quite exciting especially because a world without meetings is much more problematic without meetings cooperation communication coordination consensus decision-making are all compromised in fact in many regards organizational democracy takes place in meetings so the elimination of meetings is a false goal the elimination of bad meetings is the true goal all right so can research provide some help yes thank you absolutely I'd have to end the TED talk right that yes absolutely research can provide some help there's research that compares standing up meetings to sitting down meetings interestingly the quality of the outcomes is the same but standing up meetings take half as much time there's research that looks at satisfaction with meetings and yes there is someone who leaves a meeting feeling like it went pretty well and that's the meeting leader meeting leaders are feeling alright but why not they're in control of the experience there's some research about brainstorming but brainstorming in silence if you have individuals brainstorm in silence and meetings recording their ideas on paper or through an app they generate nearly twice as many ideas and those ideas tend to be more creative and innovative because people aren't filtering well let me share with you some other work that I've done to set the stage for some implications so first of all one of my first studies I had individuals maintain a diary of how many meetings they were having each day and also how they felt about their day at work and interestingly the more meetings people had they reported just feeling drained and fatigued and the saddest part of it is they felt that work was not accomplished however however there were certain individuals who actually seemed to thrive with lots of meetings for those people who aren't goal oriented more meetings the better but those are not typically your best performers so the flipside of it is that for those individuals who to do tend to be goal oriented which are your best performers more meetings seem to take a bigger toll on their well-being but here's the good news when the meetings were high quality those negative effects of having so many meetings were mitigated all right my final study I think in many regards this is the mo important study so in this study we had employees we tracked them over time we had them identify the types of meeting practices their bosses did and we assessed employee engagement now we know employee engagement is critical to organizations those employees who are more engaged perform better they help each other more and they're generally just happier well what we found is that those leaders who were more judicious in their calling of meetings so they only called them when they were relevant those leaders who carefully managed time in meetings and those leaders who are able to create freedom of speech in meetings employees reported more engagement so while we often think about meetings as being places of Drain meetings can be places of gain when done right so the overall takeaway in two words meetings matter meetings truly matter meetings done wrong take a toll on employee well-being frustration opportunity costs and even something called meeting recovery syndrome meeting recovery syndrome is this idea that when we have a bad meeting we just don't shed it at the door it sticks with us we ruminate and we co ruminate but meetings done right are incredible opportunities for inclusion in evasion return on investment many many positive things so who's responsible for meeting improvement we all are everyone can find some meeting that they lead at work or in the community so we all have a responsibility to try to make these things better which is why my title is the power of you to make meetings truly work all right so now let me tell you what do good meeting leaders do so how can we become excellent meeting leaders so first of all excellent meeting leaders think differently they recognize that fundamentally when you call a meeting you are a steward of others time and by having that mindset of stewardship you fundamentally approach the meeting differently most notably you think cost you care you want to honor the time of others so while research shows that 50% of agendas are recycled you would not do that because you will not dial it in you want to honor people's time so you actively make choices let me share some of these choices so first of all you go for the smallest number of people reasonable but you have a no spectators rule you consider inviting people for part of the meeting but not all of the meeting so therefore you can keep the meeting lean and not waste people's time however for those people who are more secondary you choose to keep them in the loop you still make them feel valued because one of the things that we find in our research is that when people are not invited to a meeting they find that just as worrisome because they worry that they're being excluded number two don't just default to one our meetings why our meetings one hour well that's just a default setting on Microsoft Outlook that is not a good reason to have a one-hour meeting especially because of Parkinson's law Parkinson's law is this idea that work expands whatever time is allotted to it so if you schedule a one-hour meeting low and behold it takes one hour but we can use this to our advantage given the goals of a meeting we could say this meeting should be 36 minutes or 48 minutes and those meetings will also take that but once we decide on a meeting time dial it back a little bit create some additional pressure psychological research suggests that when teams are under a little bit of pressure they perform optimally and they're more focused number three be unconventional at times mix it up try different things for example consider a walking research shows that when you do a walking meeting people who report higher satisfaction and even more creativity but there are some important rules of thumb with walking meetings first of all they need to be small just two or three people second you need to tell people of advance you're doing a walking meeting so they can wear the proper shoes you want to make sure that you walk in a circle and you also want to make sure that the agenda makes sense for a walking meeting right you can't show a deck as you carry your laptop for a nice walk also there are other purposes that could be questionable so for example if you're gonna fire somebody probably a nice walk in the park is not going to do much for them but the more I think about it actually a walking meeting is perfect in that consideration right because you can just walk right to the car start your meetings well remember as a meaning leader you are fundamentally a host you called this gathering together and as a host you want to make people feel appreciated and welcomed you want to greet them and if a couple of people don't know each other you make the introduction because you're a host also as a host it's okay to bring snacks every once in a while as crazy as it sounds one of the best predictors of meeting satisfaction around the globe are snacks and it's not the snacks in and of themselves but the fact that you took some time to think and consider others number five given this meeting leader blind-spot I mentioned earlier you need to check yourself you need to evaluate how you are as a meeting leader periodically so ask the regular attendees how am i doing what am i doing well what could I do better what are your ideas for making our meetings optimal alright anyone want a bonus all right good this is a important moment because if you said no I'd have to change my slides in real time so I'm glad that you want a bonus all right I want to say something about agendas I want to give you kind of what I see as a really exciting innovation I know we don't think of again does as being exciting innovations but I think this is an exciting innovation instead of creating your meeting agendas organized by topics consider organizing it by questions to be answered ooh having questions to be answered fundamentally changes the meeting when you think of it as questions to be answered now you have a litmus test for determining who actually needs to be there because their fundamental to ask answering the questions you have a better sense of when to end the meeting because the questions have been answered and you know what meeting success looks like the questions have been answered in a compelling way and if you can't generate questions that's your clue that the meeting does not need to happen so here we are at our conclusion and what's so exciting about meetings is that with 55 million of these a day if we can just make 20% of these 20% better the incremental effects will be amazing and while we can't control other's meetings we can control our own meetings we can do them right we can engage in behaviors that students truly communicate that we are steward and that we're honoring the time of others so with that I thank you and I appreciate being here [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 26,647

Rating: 4.9106145 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Leadership, Social Science, Time

Id: Oeoy3zCgTHU

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 22 2019