S6 E1: Featuring Dr. Rebecca Hinds

Dec 19, 2025 60-Minute Podcast Recording (Rebecca Hinds) - Transcript 00:00:00 Tracie Edwards: and we are recording. Hello everyone and welcome to the Traceability podcast. I am your host, Dr. Tracy Edwards. And today we're so very fortunate to have Dr. Rebecca Hines with us. Uh Dr. Rebecca is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University and has spent the last decade advising companies on how to collaborate more effectively in a rapidly changing workplace. Rebecca founded the work innovation lab at Asana and the work AI institute at Glean, two pioneering corporate think tanks conducting cutting edge research on how teams work, communicate, and make decisions. Her upcoming book, Your Best Meeting Ever, is a science-backed blueprint for fixing broken meeting culture. Through seven product design principles, she teaches leaders how to transform meetings from time wasters into powerful drivers of alignment, clarity, and real results. Her work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Bloomberg, Fast Company, and more. So with that introduction, Dr. Rebecca Hines, 00:01:28 Rebecca Hinds: Thank you so much, Tracie Edwards: welcome. Rebecca Hinds: Dr. Edwards. I'm really looking forward to the conversation and it's great to be Tracie Edwards: Uh yeah, and so um you know, Rebecca Hinds: here. Tracie Edwards: as I mentioned, uh when we first uh signed on, uh the meeting culture, uh is such a terrific topic for us to be focused on. Um you know I I think we are all a little uh done in sometimes by meetings and and the volume of meetings uh that we have. So as we jump in uh you have definitely helped some of the world's most respected organizations rethink how they work. And so what originally pulled you into studying organizational behavior and meeting culture specifically? Rebecca Hinds: So, I've always been fascinated by how organizations work and I think part of that I grew up as a competitive swimmer and was always fascinated by teamwork and how do you bring together a group of people in a way that the sum is greater than the the sum of the individual parts is this the whole is greater than the sum of the individual parts and wanting to apply that to organizations. 00:02:46 Rebecca Hinds: How can we design and structure our organizations such that we're getting the best out of our people in particular in that team format? And so from you know very early in my in my career even out of high school I was fascinated by organizational behavior. And when we think about meetings meetings are the work practice that we spend the most time in. And yet they're arguably the most dysfunctional practice in our entire organizations. And so from an organizational behavior and research perspective, it's both frustrating that this is the case in the state of work, but it's also fascinating. Why do we continue to cling to this practice that has largely remained unchanged for decades and decades and yet is highly dysfunctional in our organizations at the same time? Tracie Edwards: Well, you bring up a terrific example uh with the sports metaphor. um you know, you practice and you practice and you want to get the the most out of um your uh team members and that kind of thing, but you don't want to kind of do them in to the point where they're uh sort of too tired to perform, 00:04:04 Rebecca Hinds: Exactly. Tracie Edwards: right? Rebecca Hinds: And you know you can have 20 practices a week but is that really the best intentional use of time? And similarly, you know, meetings are the most expensive form of collaboration that we have available us to us in organizations in terms of time, money, sanity. And so we should be using them as a last resort and not a first uh resort in terms of our default knee-jerk reaction. Tracie Edwards: Now you have talked about the concept of meeting junk drawers. Rebecca Hinds: Sure. Tracie Edwards: Um can you u maybe elaborate a little bit on that and maybe provide an example from your research? Rebecca Hinds: So the the idea behind meeting junk drawers and I think we can all relate to this the fact that we cram so much into the meeting format in the sense of when we have a problem we schedule a meeting. When there's uncertainty, we schedule a meeting. Need alignment? Schedule a meeting. And so meetings had become this junk drawer for all of our problems and uncertainty within the organization as well. 00:05:13 Rebecca Hinds: And so again coming back to this idea of intentionality because meetings are so expensive. We need to be strategic about what we use in meetings and how we deploy this very expensive form of collaboration. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Well, and your book states that it actually costs over a trillion dollars a year in and wasted time. Um, so maybe what might be some of the most common root causes of that? Is it just old ways of thinking or um is it uh maybe a combination of old ways of thinking and maybe lacking the intentionality as you Rebecca Hinds: Mhm. That that's exactly right. Tracie Edwards: say? Rebecca Hinds: There's also a dimension of human behavior that is at the core of this as well in the sense of when we think about collaboration and in particular when we think about knowledge workers and desk workers 85 to 90% of our time on average is spent collaborating with other people at work. And so much of that collaboration is invisible. Meaning it happens through so many different people, places, processes, technologies. 00:06:29 Rebecca Hinds: It's very difficult for any given person to understand how they've collaborated with another person, how often they've collaborated with their teams, whether that collaboration has been effective. Meetings on the other hand are quite visible. Meaning in typically calendars are public within organizations. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: In many cases, they are. You can see someone in a conference room in a meeting. Often you can see a Zoom window on someone's screen. And because of that, we know human bias is to associate visibility with importance and presence with productivity. And because meetings are this very visible manifestation of work within organizations, we tend to schedule them much more frequently than than they need to be scheduled. And regardless of whether anything happens in the meeting that's productive, the sheer act of meetings has a connotation of progress and productivity that is is dangerous and leads us to accumulate more and more meetings over time and drive this immense Lost. Tracie Edwards: Yeah, you know, I I think about uh the meetings that uh I attend or that I facilitate and I've been on the unproductive end of both of those um situations. 00:07:54 Tracie Edwards: uh it seems like there's not always um an input and a corresponding output that sometimes happens with meetings. It it's it's as you say the visible but it doesn't uh always lack uh the things that you need to actually accomplish Rebecca Hinds: Exactly. Tracie Edwards: work. Rebecca Hinds: And the premise of the book, Your Best Meeting Ever, is we need to be using meetings to get work done. If if they're not serving that purpose, often we see meetings are very much theatrical in terms of their performances. They cannote the appearance of productivity, but not actually moving the work forward. And that's, you know, that's a key sign your meeting doesn't deserve to be to be on the calendar or hasn't intentionally be been designed if it's purely theatrical as opposed to moving work Tracie Edwards: Is there maybe a misunderstanding that leaders have a, Rebecca Hinds: forward. Tracie Edwards: you know, I think it just about any leader would probably say they need to fix meetings, right? Um, but is there maybe a misunderstanding of of what fixing meetings really really Rebecca Hinds: Yes. 00:09:05 Rebecca Hinds: And at the core of it is the recognition that to fix our meetings, Tracie Edwards: means? Rebecca Hinds: it takes a holistic approach, right? It's not as easy as slapping an agenda item or an agenda on a on a meeting, it requires often rebuilding from scratch. And so when I work with organizations, often the first step is to do a complete calendar reset. I call them meeting doomsdays where you're removing recurring meetings off the calendar for a short period of time and then intentionally adding them back. Often it takes that reset to not only clear the meeting debt but also clear some of our assumptions about what actually deserves uh to be a meeting. Tracie Edwards: So you actually talk about um treating meetings more like products and can you maybe elaborate on that a little bit? What do you um mean by treating them like products? Rebecca Hinds: So when we think about meetings, meetings are the most expensive product in our entire organization. They're where decisions get made, priorities get set, culture gets built or broken, and yet they're the least optimized. 00:10:20 Rebecca Hinds: as we've spoken about often we're using them as knee-jerk reactions. Often we're using them for everything rather than strategically. And so the premise of your best meeting ever is if we are to treat meetings like the strategic product they should be, well, we should be applying the same product design principles that we know make great products great. And so each of the seven chapters of the book walks through a specific product design principle applied to meetings. So we talked about meeting debt as one of those principles, clearing your meeting debt just as you would product debt where you accumulate shortcuts and patches and half-hearted fixes over time, legacy code. We accumulate legacy meeting debt in a way that often this complete reset uh helps you to to refactor the code and and set the the slate Tracie Edwards: What a great insight. Rebecca Hinds: clean. Tracie Edwards: Um, you know, speaking as someone who's got some product background, um, a tech career and that kind of thing, um, you know, it you definitely know when, um, uh, when a product is not being um, maintained or or strategically um, uh, moved along, right? 00:11:46 Rebecca Hinds: Yes. And we can think about aspects like metrics as well. The one of the chapters in the book is on metrics. Just as we would AB test a product, we need to or measure the return on investment of a product, we need to be applying that same discipline to measuring our meetings. and um all of the other principles very much are taking what we know about great product development and applying it to meetings in a way that I think especially for the tech companies but uh broadly as well helps people gro what's involved in this type of transformation around meeting culture Tracie Edwards: Right. So, Rebecca Hinds: Sure. Tracie Edwards: um you talk about seven product design principles. Um can you kind of walk us through those principles and and maybe one that would be a good place to start? Rebecca Hinds: So, we've talked about the first one around meeting debt. Similar to to product debt, we have this meeting debt where often a complete calendar sweep is is required to to reset your your assumptions and your culture around meetings. 00:12:54 Rebecca Hinds: The second is around metrics. So thinking about how are we measuring our meeting effectiveness and the book walks through several strategies both in terms of asking employees but also increasingly in terms of using analytics and AI to distill what's actually happening in the meeting and whether that has been effective given the the goals and the purpose of the meeting. The third the third one is around minimalism. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: So this again when we think about great products, we know they're minimalist. Google homepage is the classic example. There's no clutter. There's no fluff. And so similarly, the more we can minimalize our meetings, the more effective and efficient they're going to be. And so I walk through four dimensions of meetings, the length, the attendees, the agenda items, and the frequency. And for each of those dimensions, unpack some strategies in terms of how do you think more minimalistic about meetings? How do you cut a 30 minute meeting to a 15minute meeting? What are other strategies we can use to become a a meeting minimalist? 00:14:04 Rebecca Hinds: Uh the fourth one is around systems thinking. So we can think about I like to think about the metaphor of Apple products, right? Your iPhone isn't designed in isolation. It's been designed to connect to your Mac, to connect to your AirPods. And similarly, we need to think about meetings with a systems thinking lens. We know that often meetings we think are the problem, usually they're a symptom of a bigger problem, and that is a broken communication system. And in particular, when employees don't have clarity in terms of when do I use email versus when do I use Slack versus when do I use a meeting, they end up defaulting to the meeting because of this visibility bias and all sorts of social biases as well. And then the fifth one is around user centric design. So just as we design our products with a user first mindset at least great products we need to be designing our meetings with a user centric approach. And so that means designing for the attendees not designing for yourself as the organizer and thinking carefully about how are you designing the meeting in a way that is going to be the best investment for the people in the room. 00:15:25 Rebecca Hinds: Six is around rhythm. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: So just as great products entice us with different rhythms, I often think about the Fitbit where it's nudging us to take a certain action at just the right time. We need to be thinking about the cadence in the rhythm of our meetings to align with, you know, the fiscal calendar, our strategic goals. Even thinking about pauses through the day and week, the rhythm of meetings matters. It's not about scheduling meetings wherever they fit on your calendar. We need to be be considering the rhythm as well. And then the final principle is around uh technology. So innovating and iterating with technology just as we would great products. And right now AI is you know is the most exciting and also most dangerous way to innovate with technology. And so I walk through how should you be thinking about bringing AI into your meetings and what are the specific roles that AI should or shouldn't play. Tracie Edwards: Well, so one of the things that we talk about in product development is the concept of iterations. 00:16:38 Tracie Edwards: Um, what might iterations look like from a meeting perspective? Rebecca Hinds: I think it's it's such a healthy exercise to ask your team or do it yourself to continually propose different ways to innovate your meetings. And so I've done it with teams where every quarter, every month in some cases folks are submitting different ideas to iterate meetings, improve meetings, innovate meetings. And I think that constant sort of challenging of the status quo is what is often required to jolt us and keep us out of this inertia where we go through the motions with meetings. We reuse agendas week after week. We deploy the same weekly meeting and we're not consciously intentionally thinking about how do we design this meeting to meet the current moment and the needs of our team right Tracie Edwards: So, Rebecca Hinds: now. Tracie Edwards: it it it sounds like um we're taking it a little bit at a time and we're continuing evaluating the success of the approach and then um moving on and expanding and that kind of thing as as the um as the data is kind of showing us. 00:18:03 Rebecca Hinds: Exactly. And in when we think about that metrics principle, I recommend a simple metric called return on time investment. So just as we measure ROI of products, measuring return on time investment and there are lots of reasons why this tends to be more effective than just asking people how effective the meeting was because that tends to trigger this natural knee-jerk negativity bias. Whereas if you ask people to rate my meeting, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: the meeting I've led on a scale of 0 to five based on was this worth the time you invested. That helps to level set in terms of everyone has some intuitive sense of how well their time was spent, how well it was invested, and you start to get more feedback in terms of as you're doing this iteration, is it actually working? And is it working in the eyes of the people who you should be designing the meeting for rather than yourself as as the organizer? Tracie Edwards: So, uh, can you talk about the concept of meeting doomsday or the the calendar Rebecca Hinds: Yes. 00:19:18 Tracie Edwards: cleanse? Rebecca Hinds: So this is my favorite strategy and I continue to see that it works wonders especially when we think about that first dimension around meeting debt clearing your calendar. So a meeting doomsday is a 48 hour calendar cleanse. Ideally it's done at the organizational level but I've done it with small teams of nine employees. Employees are asked to delete recurring meetings for a period of 48 hours. After those 48 hours, they rebuild their calendars from scratch. So any meetings that they think are still valuable, they add them back to their calendar, but as they do so, they redesign them according to what they think is going to be most effective right now. And so I I have various strategies for helping employees, you know, make those determinations, think about the redesign. But what's fascinating is we see that most of the time savings and the time savings tend to be significant anywhere from you know 5 hours per person per month to 11 hours per person per month. We find that most of the time savings actually comes from that redesign process. 00:20:35 Rebecca Hinds: So for sure we see a lot of time savings come from deleting meetings permanently, never adding them back on the calendar, recognizing that they're legacy meetings and don't deserve to be added back. But most time savings actually come from this redesign. So turning that 30 minute meeting into the 25 minute meeting, turning the eight-person meeting into the four-person meeting, all of those small changes add up in a way that uh is meaningful for for the employee. Tracie Edwards: So, a couple of thoughts. Uh, first is I've worked in organizations that have tried the concept of no meeting Fridays. um which is which is great in theory, but then that usually meant that the meetings that would normally be on Friday get added to the other days and and which which is a big one. And then um you know now I work for an organization that has a concept of huddles. So instead of instead of a meeting, it might be a huddle that that's like a 15 minute huddle with the idea of um making it more productive with fewer people kind of thing. 00:21:48 Tracie Edwards: Could you maybe speak to those two examples and and are there pros and cons of them? Rebecca Hinds: It's it's a great it's a great question and there's lots to unpack for for both types of meetings. when we take our meeting you know initiatives when we look at no meeting days it's very important if you're going to implement no meeting days make sure that it makes sense for your organization meaning if you have an organization or a team within the organization where there are a lot of external meetings most of the work involves you know external collaboration that's an example where no meeting days probably aren't going to work for your specific organization. Also, distributed organizations, right? I've worked with organizations that try to deploy the the no meeting Friday, but then you know, is it Friday for the US team? Is it Friday for the Japan team? All of these coordination hurdles need to be be worked out. And most importantly, as you mentioned, what we often see is unless it's very intentional, those Friday meetings that are removed tend to be cluttered on on the other days. 00:23:05 Rebecca Hinds: And so, you know, having something like a meeting budget can can work here where you have a set number of meetings that you're allowed to have in a given week. and using that as a gauge to you know understand okay I'm using this meeting no meeting day very intentionally I'm not packing all my meetings on the Thursday or Monday such that you're you're eliminating the the benefit of the no meeting uh day that said overwhelmingly there's evidence in the value of no meeting days and what's fascinating is not just in terms of productivity gains and time gains uh for focus time, but also in terms of outcomes like cooperation. What we see is when workers implement no meeting days, they need to become much more strategic if it's done right. If you're not cramming the meetings on the other days, they become more cooperative because they need to be more intentional about finding those other ways to communicate and not again using meetings as the default reaction. The other thing we see in the research is micromanagement drops in general uh because managers no longer are using meetings so heavily as a 00:24:14 Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: surveillance tool to you know monitor their teams collect updates. They start to need to trust their teams more and so we see micromanagement drop as well in a way that is is very healthy. So in general, I'm a proponent of no meeting days, but it needs to be strategic. The leaders in the organization need to buy into it, and there needs to be a commitment and intentionality behind it. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: And then huddles, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: huddles are interesting. Again, the design matters a lot. And often I'll see organizations deploy the weekly huddle, sometimes the daily huddle where it's primarily aimed at status updates. And status updates do not belong in meetings. And in the book, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: I I outline a rule that helps organizations determine whether a meeting actually needs to exist. And the first part of that rule is a meeting should only exist if the purpose is to Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: decide, discuss, debate or develop yourself or your team. 00:25:32 Rebecca Hinds: The 4D test status updates do not meet that test. And often I find huddles end up being status updates that don't need to exist on the calendar. In some cases, they're very valuable. Uh, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: we know that standing up huddles as well can be very valuable in terms of these short, punchy, concise meetings, but it needs to pass the 40 test in order to justify being on the Tracie Edwards: So, um, where do you think, uh, Rebecca Hinds: calendar. Tracie Edwards: most of the the backlash comes from when it when it comes to trying to, um, uh, relieve ourselves of meetings? Does it come from the executives and the leaders? Does it come from the more rank and file? Or does it come from Rebecca Hinds: It comes it comes from from everywhere. In particular, Tracie Edwards: both? Rebecca Hinds: it often comes from new managers. We see disproportionately new managers schedule more meetings and tend to write run quite ineffective meetings as well. And largely that is because they're new to the role. 00:26:40 Rebecca Hinds: They're learning how to coordinate and collaborate with their team. There's a lot of uncertainty. And again, meetings feel like the most reliable way to get everyone's attention, move work forward, uh when really there are much more strategic ways. So often we do see for managers in particular, but especially from those new Tracie Edwards: Right. Okay. Um which which makes sense because maybe you're trying to build some rapport and um Rebecca Hinds: managers. Tracie Edwards: you're trying to get a feel for your team. Uh but you talk about how really it's an opportunity to define what really is the right tool for the communication and the update uh that that you want to uh provide. So um are there some deciding factors that would help you know um when say an email or some type of async would be better than a meeting? Rebecca Hinds: And this is a key hallmark when we look at remote first organizations. They tend to do this really well versus primarily in-person cultures tend to not do it at all in terms of delineating what is the purpose of each of these communication tools in our tech stack. 00:28:03 Rebecca Hinds: And the key is to get the meeting piece right. Help people understand what actually deserves to be a meeting. And that's where the 4D I call it the 4D CEO test comes in. So we talked about the first part of the test. A meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, develop yourself or your team. Even if it passes through that first test, it needs to pass through the CEO test which is the content needs to be complex. See, there needs to be enough ambiguity, unknown unknowns where a meeting is the most efficient way to make sense of that ambiguity together. E, is it emotionally intense? So, if you're managing emotions, needing to read emotions, delivering tough feedback, that's the E. The O comes from Amazon. So, is it a one-way door decision? Meaning once you walk through the door, it's very difficult, if not impossible, to revert course and go back the other way. And in those cases, typically getting in the room for 30 minutes, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. 00:29:10 Rebecca Hinds: 15 minutes, uh, is makes sense. The cost of misalignment is too high not to do that. And so there are all of these other things that don't pass the 4DO test. status updates, uh, boss briefings, even brainstorming doesn't pass that test. And then it's up to the organization to understand, okay, given all these other asynchronous tools, not only what is the purpose of them, where do we share status updates, where do we send announcements, it'll differ organization by organization, whether that's email, whether that's a shared Slack channel. And beyond that, what are the norms around how we use these channels as well? Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: So, when do we direct message someone in Slack? When do we use a shared channel? We know that organizations that tend to have more of a transparent written documentation culture tend to have fewer meetings because people can start to selfserve information. And so I've worked with many companies where there's an explicit norm around sharing in public channels because even if right now that information isn't relevant to everyone, later on people can then selfserve the information. 00:30:26 Rebecca Hinds: And so delineating that as part of your communication tech stack is important again in giving employees clarity as to what is the purpose of this tool versus this tool and meetings positioning them as this last resort that passes the 4D CEO Tracie Edwards: Um, have you found um that there might be any concern? Rebecca Hinds: Fast. Tracie Edwards: Uh, you know, we've all run into issues where the written word can not always um come across the way we mean it to and uh um which could Rebecca Hinds: Yep. Tracie Edwards: potentially make for say a meeting later on or a big blow up in a channel, right? Um do do you have any recommendations for those situations? Rebecca Hinds: It's such a great point, Tracy. And this is again remote first companies tend to do this really well because they're relying so heavily on asynchronous communication. And so what I see in those companies in particular is people are explicitly encouraged to use high context when writing and when communicating through virtual means. And so if you're using an emoji for example and it's ambiguous as to how that emoji could be interpreted, put in parenthesis, you know, I mean this be explicit about how you're communicating. 00:31:53 Rebecca Hinds: I worked with an organization that had an organizational norm around no lazy Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: asks. And I love that framing. Meaning if you're asking for someone for something from someone, be explicit about what you need, when, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: why, how. If you're in a globally distributed organization, don't say something like, "I need this tomorrow." Be specific in terms of the time zone. All of those pieces allow you to communicate asynchronously and spend less time in meetings. And then when you find there's enough complexity, so when it's passing that C in the CEO test, that's when you know, you know, a meeting deserves to exist if there's so much ambiguity um as a result of the the Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: communication that doesn't happen in the meeting. Tracie Edwards: Got it. Thank you. So, we're to the point where we've got our communication schedule. we've got our type of uh update mechanism. Uh now we want to be able to measure it. And you talked briefly about that return on time invested. 00:33:02 Tracie Edwards: Uh are there other metrics that that might help uh you know define the the meeting quality? And we also talked about surveying a little Rebecca Hinds: Mhm. So I recommend the Roti initiative after about 10% of meetings that you Tracie Edwards: bit. Rebecca Hinds: run. So if you're the organizer after about 10% of your meetings, asking that question, was the meeting worth the time you invested? And then there's a follow-up question. And I learned this from one of my my colleagues, Ely Keith, who first introduced me to this concept. Ask a follow-up question in terms of what can I do as the meeting organizer that would lead you to improve your rating by one point. So then you're also getting some actionable feedback alongside the rating. Beyond that, I don't recommend unless you're doing a very specific intervention around, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: we talked about iteration. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: if you're and I do a lot of these interventions around understanding you know what we can do to help teams meet more effectively but beyond that I don't recommend a whole bunch of surveying around meetings employees are overwhelmed they're survey fatigued right now I think the roadie and tailoring it to specific meetings is often 00:34:14 Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: much more productive and then pairing that with analytics so we live in a world Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: where Now every meeting platform has some sort of analytical capability, some significantly more than others. Measuring things like airtime matter a lot. We know that equal air time in the meeting is one of the strongest predictors of team performance. Multitasking is another one I I recommend. And again, none of this is to call out or police behavior or surveil its input. Ideally, it should be put in the hands of employees to be able to self diagnose their participation and their contributions in meetings. But they're all such useful data points when we think about just how much time we spend in meetings to understand, you know, even charisma score. Now, there there are meeting tools that will give you a charisma score based on how you how you show up and participate in meetings. All of this feedback is essential to helping us understand how do we design and optimize our our meetings and hopefully have that best meeting 00:35:32 Tracie Edwards: So, Rebecca Hinds: ever. Tracie Edwards: what does it look like to maybe add delight to meetings? So, you know, you're you've got your turn on time invested. you have ideas for how to make the meetings better, but what about that concept of of I guess delight or fun or enthusiasm? Um, what does that look Rebecca Hinds: It's important and this falls into the bucket of user centric design. Tracie Edwards: like? Rebecca Hinds: Designing the meeting to cater to your attendees. And when we think about meetings, we want them to be human. They're so expensive. They're so important within our organization where there needs to be that human touch associated with them. And a lot of my research, a lot of the book focuses on how to make meetings more efficient. That's absolutely important. But I'll often say and my colleague uh Bob Sutton will say the purpose of making our meetings more efficient is to make time for the things in work and in life that shouldn't be efficient. And delight is one of those aspects where having a moment of delight which is a very unique combination of joy and surprise. 00:36:50 Rebecca Hinds: So, it needs to be something that employees, attendees aren't necessarily expecting. It can be as simple as a shout out within the meeting or you're bringing some baked good from home in a way that you can tell a personal story around. Those moments of delight. They inject joy within participants. They make the meeting memorable and employees start to want to show up for meetings rather than dread them on their calendar. And so it's an inefficient practice, but one that can only sometimes only needs to take 30 seconds and makes the meeting much more human and and memorable. Tracie Edwards: One example that that I use um with one of my teams is is every Friday they get a happy Friday and that seems to sort of brighten everybody up just a little bit on a Friday morning and uh get them a little more enthused about the Rebecca Hinds: I love that. And that's that's all it takes. Tracie Edwards: meeting. Rebecca Hinds: It it's not it doesn't necessarily need to be a heavy lift at all, but that moment of delight is is 00:37:58 Tracie Edwards: So maybe if we zoom out a little bit, Rebecca Hinds: important. Tracie Edwards: how is the nature of collaboration changing and and um what does that do to meetings going forward? Rebecca Hinds: It's a big question and we've seen fascinating shifts over really since the turn of the century in terms of the time we spend collaborating and one of my coll collaborators uh Rob Cross has done fantastic research to show over the past two decades or so the time we spend collaborating has increased 50%. So we're collaborating more than ever in our organizations. We know we have more meetings now. Increasingly, we're seeing that collaboration happen crossf functionally within our organizations much more so than we've seen in the past. So no longer as a marketer are you working exclusively with the marketing team. There's always been a dimension of crossunctional collaboration, but we're seeing it on a new level right now. And part of that is because work is becoming more complex and we know any missionritical complex work within an organization needs to bring together different functions and groups of people. 00:39:13 Rebecca Hinds: And then now we're seeing this other dimension of collaborating with AI and collaborating with agents. And this is the hardest problem organizations are facing. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: They've started to understand how to use AI to improve individual productivity and identifying individual use cases. How that happens at the team level is something every organization is struggling with. What is that division of labor between humans and AI? Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: And how do you also get your employees into the right mental mindset to embrace collaborating with something that inherently feels threatening to them is a very hard challenge but will certainly impact the future of Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: collaboration and the future of meetings because Tracy, I'm sure you've started to see these bots joining the meetings. You have multiple AI transcript bots. Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: You have people sending their digital twins to meetings. Again, Tracie Edwards: Mhm. Rebecca Hinds: it it goes back to this intentionality and designing just as we would the humans in the room. Making sure every AI, every bot has a clearly defined role in the meeting and it's not creating more distraction, more overwhelm, more friction. 00:40:33 Rebecca Hinds: Uh it's actually additive to the meeting. Tracie Edwards: it goes back to that intentionality that you talked about earlier. Rebecca Hinds: Yes. Tracie Edwards: So, as we um get to wrapping up here, uh for anyone listening who might feel overwhelmed right now by meetings, maybe what's one small achievable change they they could make this Rebecca Hinds: So I love the strategy that comes from my my friends and colleagues Lidy Clotsson and Bob Sutton and Tracie Edwards: week. Rebecca Hinds: they call it the rule of halves and this falls into the the principle around meeting minimalism. So essentially what what Leidy's work has shown is as humans we are naturally conditioned to solve problems through addition. So we add more people to our organizations, we add more money, we add more meetings, we add more people to the meetings. And so the rule of halves encourages a subtraction mindset. And Lid's work has shown that if you prime people to subtract, it dislodges that bias toward addition and people adopt a subtraction mindset. And it's often not that we don't like subtraction. Often it's because it doesn't even occur to us that we can and should be adopting this this mindset. 00:41:53 Rebecca Hinds: And so the rule of halves can be applied to any one of those dimensions of meaning minimalism that I spoke about. So, the length, the attendees, the agenda items, or the frequency. And I recommend as a start, take one of those dimensions, pick a meeting that you know hasn't been optimized, hasn't been intentionally designed, you dread it on your calendar, and think about what is one dimension. Whether that's a 30 minute meeting, cutting it in half to 15 minutes. Whether it's an eight-person meeting that's too big and has a bunch of spectators, cutting it to four people, moving a weekly meeting to every other week, or a status update meeting that has eight agenda items, try to pick the top four. That type of meeting minimalism mindset is something that everyone can do and is a pretty lightweight way to get into that important subtraction Tracie Edwards: Love it. Rebecca Hinds: mindset. Tracie Edwards: Thank you. So, um, what do you hope readers and leaders and organizations take away from your book? Rebecca Hinds: I hope it's first and foremost the mindset around meetings. 00:43:06 Rebecca Hinds: These are strategic products within our organization. We know that they have immense immense importance within the organization, but we need to be intentional about how we design them. And the pro the promise of the book is you'll have your best meeting ever. And so that's what I hope for every reader. They walk away from the book ready to have that that best meeting ever. Tracie Edwards: Fantastic. So, where can listeners go to to connect with you and get the book? Rebecca Hinds: So, the book is available on Amazon, Your Best Meeting Ever, as well as your your favorite bookstores. Uh, my website is rebeccinds.com and I'm on LinkedIn as Tracie Edwards: Terrific. Rebecca Hinds: well. Tracie Edwards: Thank you so much for your time today, Dr. Rebecca Hines. Um, this is such a a important topic, especially as as we get close to the new year and and want to be planning um with more intentionality. So, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate it. Rebecca Hinds: Thank you so much for having me. I've loved the Tracie Edwards: And for our listeners, Rebecca Hinds: conversation. Tracie Edwards: if you have enjoyed uh the conversation today, we hope you'll take some time and leave us a review on uh Spotify or on Apple Podcast and uh let us know if there's anything uh you like and if we can do anything better. So, thank you so much. Transcription ended after 00:44:44 This editable transcript was computer generated and might contain errors. People can also change the text after it was created.