We All Hate Meetings—Here’s How to Make Them Work

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m Adi Ignatius.

ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, Alison. Today’s topic is one that every single listener is sure to have strong views about, and that is meetings. So, Alison, what do you generally think about work meetings?

ALISON BEARD: I try to avoid them at all costs.

ADI IGNATIUS: Thought you’d say that. And why? What do you hate most about meetings?

ALISON BEARD: I think that in most meetings, people spend a lot of time talking, rather than deciding or doing. And as someone who really likes to get things done, I think they’re a productivity waster.

ADI IGNATIUS: You’re not alone in that. The numbers should alarm you. All right. People spend about 30 percent of their work time in meetings. And in surveys, generally say that half of their meetings are bad. So, if you do the math, six hours of bad meetings a week, average U.S. salary $30 an hour, cost of… Anyway, it works out to about $870 billion in the U.S. wasted in pointless meetings. That’s about 6 percent of the U.S. GDP.

ALISON BEARD: I am glad that you did the math instead of asking me to do it, but that is really astonishing.

ADI IGNATIUS: It’s astonishing, but we’re here today not just to carp about the negative. We can do that all day on meetings, but to talk about how to do meetings well and so well that it’s a competitive advantage for your company.

So, my guest is Paul English, who was the cofounder of Kayak, who has thought a lot and who has talked to a lot of fellow CEOs about how to create a productive meeting culture. He’s the author of The Meeting Book: How the Best Companies Meet Better. Here’s our conversation.

So, you’re writing about something that everybody feels very personal about, feels very deeply about, meetings, and you start with why meetings can really suck the energy out of a company. So, I want to start there, why are meetings so bad? Why do we do this so badly?

PAUL ENGLISH: I think people are unprepared to run meetings. Most companies I’ve worked at, when I think about myself as a young manager decades ago, no one ever trained me how to run a meeting, they just don’t take it serious enough which is crazy because you think about how much time people spend in meetings, you’d want to be best in class at it.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, to the extent that it can be analyzed and quantified, what is the cost of all of these bad meetings that we’re having?

PAUL ENGLISH: So, we did a survey of 1,000 people on LinkedIn. Over 50 percent of the people believed that over 50 percent of the meetings were a complete waste of time. Now, if you have 1,000-person company, take the average white-collar salary in the U.S., it’s just under $10 million a year of staff time sitting in the bad meetings. But that’s not the worst part, the worst part is not just the salaries of the people sitting in the room, I’ve heard of people who’ve had a timer showing dollar bills flying by and that’s good but the problem’s worse than that because it demoralizes people.

I actually spoke to a reporter recently and he told me, at his institution which I will not name, he said, every time he gets a meeting invite and they say there’s free pizza provided, he groans and he says, “My God, if they have to bribe me with pizza, this is going to be a horrible meeting.”

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. I think about my work and there are times when I feel like, okay, if I could just get out of these meetings that I don’t like and not be under this avalanche of email, I can get back to my job. But then I wonder, what is my job? Is our job just doing email and having meetings?

PAUL ENGLISH: It depends what your job is. I’m an engineer but my career is running design teams and so we actually have to draw pretty pictures and write software but it does seem like, over time, particularly in management, that on my worst days, my calendar runs my life. On my best days, I have time to think and write and design but I also do things like I color code my calendar and I analyze … I’ve been doing this for 20 years. Every Monday, Friday, I look at my calendar two weeks in advance with my assistant and I look at things like what percent of my meetings are initiated by me as opposed to I’m doing someone a favor by sitting in on their meeting.

And a bad day is you have eight meetings in a row where you’re just doing people favors and it’s good to do people favors, don’t get me wrong, you want to help people out a little bit but, if you don’t get your own agenda done and your own agenda can only be done at night when you put the kids to bed or on the weekends, that’s not a very good work scenario.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, I’m guessing that everyone who’s listening to this has their own frustration with meetings but, beyond that, at their companies has tried to attack this in some way like no meeting Fridays, no meetings without agendas, stand-up meetings – but they always come back. What is it about the tyranny of the meeting that, no matter what we do, no matter how we try to rope it down, it just comes back in ways that we don’t like?

PAUL ENGLISH: A couple things with that. One is it’s too easy to schedule a meeting, you just click a couple buttons and there’s a meeting. If you look at Google Calendars, one of the leading calendars out there, I wish it made it a little harder to schedule a meeting, imagine if you had to put in your credit card every time you schedule a meeting more than 10 people.

Also, their default meeting should be short. We should have shorter meetings, fewer people in meetings and less meetings and one thing you need to do from a calendar hygiene standpoint is, every now and then, maybe once a month, just look at your calendar as a manager and say this meeting I’ve been having every Monday, do I really need to keep running that every Monday, can I change that to a monthly meeting, can I change it to an email.

There’s a famous internet meme saying this meeting should have been an email. But one of the meetings that drives me the craziest are the stand-up status meetings where you go around the room and says, “What did you do yesterday? What are you planning to do today?” Then the next person, “What to do yesterday? What do you want to do?” My God, can someone just put that in an email or a Google document, I don’t want to sit there for an hour going around the room.

ADI IGNATIUS: Why do organizations, thoughtful organizations keep creating and sustaining meetings that everyone knows are a waste of time?

PAUL ENGLISH: I think a lot of it is mid-level management thinks that their job is to run meetings and they put a meeting on people’s calendar, they feel good like I’m getting work done. Look, I’m getting all these people together. And I’m not saying you don’t need meetings, you need meetings but there’s just too many. I think it was Toby at Shopify who just randomly deleted meetings off people’s calendars, took a hatchet to the calendars and started deleting meetings left and right and saw what happened, would people notice and would they just create them again or would they be shy to create them again if the CEO deleted them?

I know I interviewed Nate, the CTO of Airbnb, about meetings at Airbnb and he was saying, if there’s no agenda, he just hangs up. He doesn’t say, “Okay, I’ll check in with you guys later,” he just literally hangs up the Zoom call. And I think it takes visionary leaders who realize that you want time for people to actually do their work, to do writing and research and design and sales and customer support and, the more you put them in meetings, the less work they’re going to get done.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, let’s talk then more positively about creating a meeting culture that works and let’s talk about Kayak. So, you founded Kayak, you sold it to Priceline, which is now booking.com, for $2 billion. And you say in your book when asked how did you generate so much revenue with so few employees, your answer has been that you focus on, one, hiring really good people but, two, the way you ran your meetings. So, what is it that Kayak did right in terms of how it ran its meetings?

PAUL ENGLISH: Yeah, I was a maniac in the early years. We designed our space and we had all glass walls so everyone could see what’s happening in these meeting rooms when they’re walking by and, anytime there was more than a handful of people in the room, there was 10 people in the room, I’d stick my head in and everyone groan because they knew it was about to happen, I’d be like, “What are you guys talking about?” They’d say, “We’re designing a new interface for Expedia,” I’m like, “There’s not one or two of you smart enough to do that? You need 10 of you?” and I would literally say this all the time. It got to the point where people were embarrassed to have big meetings at Kayak because they knew that I’d give them grief about it.

I also at one point bought a mechanical attendance clicker like they have at county fairs where you count how many people are going into the big tent or whatever and I’d hang them outside each meeting room. Not that we would literally count the people but as a visual reminder when you saw the meeting room that someone’s paying attention, there better not be too many people here. I’m a big fan of ending meetings early, a lot of times we need to just schedule for an hour because maybe you’re going to need an hour but sometimes you’re done in 20 minutes and say, “Okay, let’s end it early,” and you give people an extra 40 minutes to go back to their desk. I did that all the time at Kayak and people appreciated it.

ADI IGNATIUS: What are some of the, I don’t know, the rules of the road for having successful meetings? Is it we have an agenda, we have a moderator, we do something, go around the room?

PAUL ENGLISH: I’ll tell you about the meetings … I’ll use Kayak as an example, talk about the meetings we did there. One is, if you’re running the meeting, there’s two goals to every meeting, one is come to good decisions quickly and the second one, I’ve never seen this written down anywhere but this is my belief, is to improve the relationships with the people in the room.

So, meeting is an opportunity to engage, to fight in a healthy way, to go back and forth, to hear different opinions and to do that successful, the meeting has energy and you improve relationships. If you have a meeting where someone’s really annoying and they keep interrupting people, if you watch meetings carefully, you’ll notice things. For example, men interrupt women more than women interrupt men. Once you discover this, you can fix it and, therefore, improving the output of half the people on your team.

So, it’s observing, observing relationships, do people roll their eyes when someone talks, are they on their phone and just trying to make sure people are engaged. And you want to end the meeting on a positive note, you always want to say this is awesome, we made a big decision on X, Y and Z, the next step is this. So, everything should be around making decisions and then coming up with the next steps are.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, I want to push you on this a little bit because you said, when you were at Kayak, it wasn’t just that you tried to run meetings better but that the way you and your team ran meetings was a competitive advantage. So, talk a little bit more. Everything you say makes sense, it sounds, yeah, that makes sense but it sounds like you tried to get more out of the meetings that you did have.

PAUL ENGLISH: The meeting is tied into the entire culture as one piece of a culture that was carefully woven and one of the things that happened in meetings that would shock new people is how much authority we would give people. When I run a meeting, if someone spoke up about something, I would say, “That’s an awesome insight, can you go and redesign how we should do that and bring it back to the team?” And I’d assign that to a junior person like change the process by which you’re going to do something and it was constantly pushing things down and assigning things so that someone would get an action, would take on responsibility of getting something done as opposed to doing everything by committee.

I’ve always said that nothing was ever invented with 10 people in a room. If you have 10 people trying to design something, there’s too many people who can say no, there’s too many people who can bring criticism. I like small meetings, I think things are best invented with two or three people in the room especially if they’re trained on – I often take my classes to improv comedy training to learn the skills of yes and, to look at an idea of someone in the room and say, “That’s amazing. What if we did it this way? Could we use that in customer support as well as sales?” Or just try to … If you’re trying to improve ideas all the time and you train people, the meeting is a place we improve ideas and support each other, you can get a lot done with very few people.

ADI IGNATIUS: I’m just thinking of Jensen Huang at NVIDIA who … It’s not quite the same thing maybe but his view is I want to have big meetings, I don’t want to meet one-on-one. When I have something to say, I want the big tent, I want to talk to a lot of people. I think it’s partly so he didn’t have to do it over and over again but also just a general sense of transparency. And maybe that these are different kinds of meetings he’s talking about or maybe it’s a different philosophy, a different approach.

PAUL ENGLISH: No, I believe in sometimes having big meetings. If the purpose of a meeting is to share information like we’re announcing our quarterly financial results or we’ve been acquired or we acquired a company or we’re launching a new product, I believe in big meetings to inform people and also to make sure you’re taking questions from the audience. What I don’t like for big meetings is meetings where you’re trying to design something or come up with something new because, invariably, you’ll have, let’s say, just 10 people in the room, nevermind 20, 30 or 100 but 10 people in a room, you’re trying to design something, someone’s looking at their iPhone and reading their text message in the middle of a meeting, they’re bored. And when they do that, it’s worse than them not being there, they’re sucking the energy out of the room and you want meetings where everyone is participating.

I look at my role as someone running meetings a little bit as a symphonic conductor that you’re balancing the energy, a little more timpani, a little more oboe, a little less violin and you’re moving the energy around the room and, if you’re getting people to participate and if you hire really good people and you get them to participate and help each other, it makes for exciting meetings.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, we always try to be practical and give advice that’s immediate and actionable for our listeners. What’s a meeting habit that maybe separates great organizations from mediocre ones that people could pick up on immediately?

PAUL ENGLISH: I don’t know that I could point to one, there are so many. Have an agenda ahead of time so people come prepared, start on time, have it be a small meeting. If people aren’t contributing, kick them out particularly for weekly meetings. Try to make decisions during the meeting. The worst thing is you sit through an hour meeting and you walk out you’re not sure what decisions were just made and you might say, “Well, that was an entertaining hour, it was nice that they fed us pizza but did we really change the company in any way during that meeting?” So, have a tight agenda, start on time, have the right people in the room and make decisions.

ADI IGNATIUS: There’s also the phenomenon of the meeting after the meeting or the meeting before the meeting where stuff really happens that, once attendees realize that and particularly if they’re not part of that other meeting, there’s a little bit of cynicism that this is performative and the real conversations are going to happen in this other gathering. How do you think about that? Sometimes you need a smaller group but, if you do that continually, I think that can actually damage morale.

PAUL ENGLISH: The pre-meeting meetings often make a lot of sense if you’re doing organizational change. Humans do not respond well to change, we like things in a static state. If you’re making a big change in your company, you’re cancelling a product, you’re buying a competitor, any big change, sometimes, before you announce that to a big group of people, you take the opinion leaders and you pre-sell them on it one-on-one, hear their feedback one-on-one, adjust your pitch, by the time the meeting happens, you’re better attuned to how people might perceive this news. So, I’ve done some of that, some pre-selling of taking people who are the most vocal and run some ideas ahead of time.

The post-meeting, the only thing I like about post-meeting is if you name it in the meeting and say, “Okay, we’re not sure we’re going to do pricing, let’s have Eliza go off and come back to us proposal on pricing,” and then that’s a post-meeting that’s been named during the meeting. I don’t like it when the meeting seems to have made decisions, a meeting of 10 people and three people just change a decision and it’s bizarre, why did I sit through that for an hour if three other people just did a totally different direction.

ADI IGNATIUS: So, let’s talk about some of the other companies that in your book you talk about that have gotten it right or have done something interesting in terms of meeting culture and one of them is Amazon and, among other things, they outlawed PowerPoint presentations. Talk about the importance of that and how they think about meetings.

PAUL ENGLISH: So, Amazon, we talked about them in the book, we interviewed Wayne Duso who ran AWS in Boston for many years, helped build that organization and Jeff Bezos sent out the famous email to his team saying no more PowerPoint and you have to write a six-page memo that you read ahead of time so, the time the meeting starts, everyone’s up to speed and you get to work immediately so you’re not spending the meeting training people and then working on the tough stuff, you train them ahead of time because they’ve read the memo and they all walk in prepared. I like that, I don’t do that all the time but I do it for big issues, I guess that’s the biggest thing at Amazon.

I know Scott Cook in Intuit, we interviewed him, he was so inspired by that and he tried to just copy that at Intuit doing the same thing because, obviously, it really worked well for Amazon. I’m not sure that the process for one company always should be the same for another company, there could be something unique about Amazon for why that works well that might not be the best thing for your company but I think it’s important to learn from companies what are the best practices and try out and see what works best for your companies.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah, I think that’s true with most management advice, there isn’t necessarily one way to do things but you need to focus on something and stick to it and have a purpose about it. You also praise LinkedIn in the book and their meeting culture seems to be particularly action oriented. What do they get right?

PAUL ENGLISH: Well, first of all, Reid Hoffman is just such an incredibly impressive person, he was really big on the agenda, he’s really big on the right people in the room, he’s really big on, if someone’s in the room and they’re not contributing, they should not be in the room. So, he was very action oriented, he liked having fights in meetings, he would talk about the utility of that of people hashing things out in real time rather than walking away. The worst thing is walk away in silent disagreement, the boss says something and you just nod your head but internally you’re thinking that makes no sense and you leave the meeting without saying it. So, Reed is very much on being honest and transparent and saying what you actually think.

ADI IGNATIUS: The conversation we’ve had so far has been, at least in my mind, presupposing that we’re talking about meetings where people are in a room together and sitting around a table, we haven’t really talked about in office versus remote and hybrid. Particularly as you worked on this book and talked to people, do you feel strongly about in office versus remote or in terms of having meetings that somehow accommodate both in the best possible way?

PAUL ENGLISH: I like hybrid. COVID taught us that remote can work, many companies grew incredibly well during the pandemic and they learned to operate well. And then people got comfortable saying I like this that I can work from home a couple days a week so I don’t have to do an hour commute in the morning and the afternoon and I’m going to choose my employers by ones that let me have this mix of some in office, some at home and a lot of top employees are making the decision that way.

There is a movement in tech right now to get people back in the office five days a week but a lot of people are resisting it. I’ve seen hybrid work really well. For my own company, we work mostly remote and we meet in person about once a week but we also have new people meet more often with other people on the team just so they get up to speed and form their relationships, a lot of the in person stuff is just around relationship forming. If you have a senior team that already has good relationship, you don’t have to do the in person as often.

ADI IGNATIUS: There’s a truism that the best meetings either everyone is remote, everyone is dialed in or everyone is there in person, when you try to do both, somehow half the people are going to not quite be fully engaged, et cetera, et cetera. Do you agree with that or you think you can manage that hybrid aspect?

PAUL ENGLISH: I have one nitpick that I recommend, anytime a meeting is some people on the room together and some people remote, the video cameras are up on the wall which video the room are horrible because you’ll look at a Zoom meeting with five tiles and one of them has 10 people in it, you can’t see who those 10 people are, you can’t get the nuances of their facial expressions, all that. So, my thing is, if you’re going to have a hybrid meeting where some people together and some people remote, make all the people in the room together each have their laptop open, just mute their microphones so at least, when you’re the person on Zoom, you can see each person in the meeting but sometimes it just happens that way.

I’m helping create a new travel company with my old Kayak cofounder, Steve Hafner and half the team is in New York, half the team is in Boston. In fact, Kayak itself was created that way, the development was done in Boston, the sales and marketing were done in Connecticut and we try to do that, put everyone on their own laptop so they look like equals in the Zoom meeting.

ADI IGNATIUS: Yeah. Okay, so if you’re advising a CEO whose employees are routinely saying meetings are the worst part of working here, what does that tell you about the organization and what should that person do first?

PAUL ENGLISH: I think it’s important for your listeners who are running companies, it’s really important to survey the team and saying how are people feeling about meetings. I put anonymous surveys out there and say give feedback and then train your managers how to run better meetings because … Again, my survey of 1,000 people, over half those people said over half their meetings were a complete waste of time, that’s horrible not for just the loss of salary but for the loss of productivity and for the degradation and morale that’s done in those bad meetings. I think just the first thing is you can’t improve something until you measure it so, if you’re running a company, you have to measure people who spend a lot of time in meetings, are they enjoying it, are they getting the right decisions made, is it clear, do they come prepared. You have to survey that stuff and then have someone responsible for training people how to run better meetings.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so another practical question then. So, all right, if a CEO wants to improve its meeting capacity immediately, what’s the highest return intervention? Whether it’s fewer meetings, smaller meetings, better agendas, more joy, where would you start?

PAUL ENGLISH: I spoke to the CEO of Booking Holdings Glenn Fogel a while ago and I have, since writing the book, created a company that takes some of the ideas of the book and the software that we’re building is going to help people improve meetings. And I went to Glenn and I told him what we’re working on and I said, “Would you be interested in doing a pilot at booking.com?” He said, “I tell you what, if you’re using your software, you just randomly deleted half my meetings, I’ll pay you whatever you want.” So, I think Glenn was saying, as an executive running an organization of tens of thousands of people, he thinks it’s too much that people are in too many meetings and he’s just like, “Help me figure out … Don’t randomly cancel meetings but help me figure out which weekly meetings should be monthly or quarterly, which meetings should be canceled, which 10-person meetings should be three-person meetings.”

They mean some discipline about efficiency and what you find when you try to do that meeting surgery of making fewer meetings, less often, less people is you have to improve process in order to do that. Constantly people say I can’t miss the weekly meeting, these things aren’t decided there, well, you got to find another way to do it if you’re not going to do it with 10 people around a room for an hour every Monday.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right. So, I have to lead a meeting after this, give me a pep talk.

PAUL ENGLISH: So, the first thing is make sure everyone in the room talks, start on time, start with high energy, make sure the team says that you’re excited. I remember, when I worked for Bill Campbell at Intuit, every time I walked into his office, I left his office thinking like he woke up today just to see me. So, make those people in the next meeting feel that, that that’s the best meeting of your day and how excited you are to have them together and then bounce the energy around the room, have everyone participate. It’ll be a fun meeting if the energy moves around the room and everyone has something to add.

ADI IGNATIUS: Paul, thank you for joining us today.

PAUL ENGLISH: All right, thanks a lot.

ADI IGNATIUS: That was Paul English, cofounder of Kayak and author of The Meeting Book: How the Best Companies Meet Better. Next week, Alison dives into how leaders can handle rule breaking better.

If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.

And thanks to our team, Senior Producer Mary Dooe, Audio Product Manager Ian Fox, and Senior Production Editor Kristin Murphy Romano. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Adi Ignatius.