The Surprising Science of Meetings Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Many workers find meetings to be a waste of time, but facilitators and managers can take control and make meetings into grounds for creativity and productivity. Start by evaluating yourself as a facilitator and looking for feedback from attendees. Streamline your agenda and meeting participants to make the most of every minute. Add a time constraint and shorten meetings as much as possible so there’s no incentive to waste time. Keep the meeting energy positive by encouraging play and generously giving to your attendees. Take moments of silence to allow for independent thinking and problem-solving. Try shaking up meetings with standing or walking meetings. Finally, embrace the teleconference and use formal constraints to keep people focused.

About the Author

Steven Rogelberg is an author, editor, and professor. He is the editor of Journal of Business and Psychology and the Chancellor’s Professor at UNC Charlotte. He is a professor of Organizational Science, Management, and Psychology and the Director of Organizational Science at UNC Charlotte. He has published books and has run three consulting centers working with Fortune 100 companies. He currently runs an outreach initiative focused on nonprofit organization effectiveness.

Topics

Career & Success Management & Leadership

The Surprising Science of Meetings Book Summary Preview

Who Should Read This?

Meeting facilitators looking to lead their teams more efficiently.
Anyone interested in how to break out of the frustration of traditional meetings.
Anyone fascinated by the science and studies behind more productive group work.

What You’ll Learn

How to be the best meeting facilitator you can be.
How to craft the ideal meeting agenda.
Why holding a meeting for 48 minutes will get your team’s attention.

Key Insights

In workplaces around the world, meetings feel tedious, boring, and like a waste of time. In fact, Steven Rogelberg documents the various ways meetings are lowering workplace productivity and stifling creativity. In this book, he points to various evidence on how we can break out of frustrating meeting structures and maximize their efficiency. With a few simple changes, you too can revamp your meetings and turn them into a space of creativity, collaboration, and progress.

Meetings can be unenjoyable for everyone but are inevitable for teams. Start assessing your meetings to find ways to improve.

Across the United States, nearly 55 million meetings happen every single day. That’s a lot of time (and foregone working hours) spent sitting in boardrooms or Zoom calls. Author Steven Rogelberg wondered if this time was being well spent.

According to some studies, many Americans would say no. In a 2005 survey, Microsoft surveyed its 40,000 employees on what they thought of meetings. 69% said they were unproductive. In another survey by management software Clarizen, over 50% off workers said they’d rather do another unpleasant work activity than sit in on a weekly team update. So, if people would rather be working why not scrap meetings altogether?

Getting rid of meetings isn’t an option for many teams. They were created to facilitate collaboration between team members, allowing colleagues and departments to connect. The author suggests that instead of cutting down on meetings, there are many proven actionable ways to improve meeting culture from the bottom up.

Rate your meeting facilitation skills and start asking for frequent feedback.

In this section, the author directs his attention to managers and meeting facilitators looking to change their meetings. To start improving, he asks us to rate ourselves as meeting facilitators.

Studies show that many of us are likely to overestimate our abilities as leaders. In his own research, the author discovered that meeting facilitators rated their performance higher than their attendees. He also found that most facilitators believe they were above average, a statistical impossibility.

To give yourself a fair and measured assessment start by looking around your meetings. Do you feel in control of your meetings? Are some people talking way more than others who hardly talk at all? Are some participants distracted and checking their phones the entire time? All these signs mean there is room to improve.

Next, get a more objective picture by asking your meeting attendees for regular feedback. For example, Weight Watchers keeps screens outside of their meeting rooms to collect feedback about each meeting. Employees anonymously rate the meetings on an emoji scale. This way, they were able to track if changes were making participants happier, like...