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

**Hadi Ignatius** (0:01)
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**Alison Beard** (0:24)
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**Hadi Ignatius** (0:59)
I'm Hadi Ignatius.

**Alison Beard** (1:00)
I'm Alison Beard, and this is the HBR IdeaCast.

**Hadi Ignatius** (1:10)
All right, Allison, today's topic is one that every single listener is sure to have strong views about, and that is meetings. So Allison, what do you generally think about work meetings?

**Alison Beard** (1:21)
I try to avoid them at all costs.

**Hadi Ignatius** (1:23)
Thought you'd say that, and why? What do you hate most about meetings?

**Alison Beard** (1:27)
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.

**Hadi Ignatius** (1:40)
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 US salary $30 an hour, cost of that. Anyway, it works out to about $870 billion in the US, wasted in pointless meetings. That's about 6 percent of the US GDP.

**Alison Beard** (2:08)
Oof, I am glad that you did the math instead of asking me to do it, but that is really astonishing.

**Hadi Ignatius** (2:14)
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 co-founder 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** (3:03)
I think people are unprepared to run meetings. You know, most companies I've worked out, 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.

**Hadi Ignatius** (3:23)
So what, 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** (3:30)
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 a 1,000 person company, take the average white collar salary in the US, 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 have had a timer showing dollar bills flying by and that's good. But the problem is 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 them with pizza, this is going to be a horrible meeting.

**Hadi Ignatius** (4:24)
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? I mean, is our job just doing email and having meetings?