“Could this encounter be an email?” Why we need to run meetings better

Anyone who has had a desk job has felt it. You’re an hour into a meeting and you can’t help but think, “why am I here?” Or, “Could this meeting be an email?”

But organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg says increasing productivity has more to do with organizing meetings better than eliminating them completely.

“The fundamental problem with meetings is bad meetings, wasted time in meetings — but meetings themselves are not inherently the problem,” Rogelberg, a professor at the University of North Carolina, told me. Cost of living.

“Meeting is an evolution in terms of seeing people as key actors in decision making and… including people in making decisions at work and solving problems.”

Rogelberg can be considered a meeting expert. He is the author of Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1:1 Meetings, and has been studying meetings for two decades. He has worked with companies like Amazon and IBM to improve their meetings.

“People have met since the beginning of time. The cave people would meet. We have meetings that are documented as part of democracy in Greece,” Rogelberg said. “People meet. We gather. It’s a fundamental essence of being human.”

Shopify’s changes

Canadian tech giant Shopify has been working to reduce the number of meetings for the past year. reported Bloomberg that the company has started using a calculator that tells its employees how much each meeting costs the company.

In January they have all meetings with more than two people are temporarily cancelledwith the aim of giving employees more time to do their job.

“No one came to Shopify to join meetings,” a company spokesperson told CBC in an email.

“We are a company of builders and craftsmen, and uninterrupted time is truly the most important resource of a craftsman,” the email read. “We’ve seen positive effects by removing meetings from calendars at the beginning of the year and asking people to really be aware of what they’ve added back in.”

But a former Shopify employee, whom CBC has agreed not to mention while looking for a job in the tech industry, says it wasn’t all that productive.

According to the employee, there were “disastrous” and “tangible” consequences of not having those meetings anymore.

“The effect they’re trying to have is to reduce organizational inefficiencies,” he said. “Those inefficiencies still exist, like people didn’t learn how to have better meetings. Instead, we would just learn to be sneaky.”

Rogelberg says he appreciates what Shopify was trying to do, but he says the solution to lack of productivity isn’t just canceling meetings.

“I also believe there should be some pullback in the sheer number of meetings, but ultimately their solution doesn’t solve the fundamental problem with meetings.”

How to run meetings better

Rogelberg says getting better at meetings isn’t just a quick fix. He says multiple changes and a shift in focus are needed.

He notes that there are simple ways for businesses to improve meetings and use employee time more efficiently.

He suggests seeing who is invited to each meeting. In many cases, he says, there are too many people present.

This often stems from a desire to be more inclusive, says Rogelberg, but it could also just be laziness, as technology makes it easy to invite more people. He says managers also use meetings to track their employees and get updates on how much work they are doing.

So sometimes it can be helpful to reduce the number of people invited to a meeting, or to have some people leave the meeting early.

Rogelberg also suggests having a focused agenda focused on answering questions, rather than just a list of things to talk about.

“If you just can’t think of any questions, it probably means you don’t need a meeting.”