Lead In 30 Podcast

Your Meetings Are Killing Productivity and Here's Why

• Russ Hill

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The science shows we're doing it all wrong! New research about virtual and offsite meetings shows they're leading to burnout and lack of engagement. We're doing it all wrong. In this episode Lone Rock Leadership cofounder Russ Hill shares three new scientific research studies that shows how we need to adjust our virtual meetings and our offsite schedules to boost engagement and drive results.

• Virtual meetings should ideally last 30 minutes, never exceeding 2 hours
• Limit meetings to 3-4 per day with substantial breaks between them
• For offsites, start later (9-10am) or at noon, not 8am
• End meetings around 2:30-3pm when brains naturally disengage
• Block your calendar to prevent back-to-back scheduling
• Leave people "wanting more" rather than completely depleted
• Microsoft's brain activity research shows significant stress during back-to-back meetings
• Long meetings create both mental underload (boredom) and overload (information saturation)
• Shorter meetings lead to more engagement and better outcomes
• Allow time for networking, individual work, and natural connections

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Speaker 1:

Your meetings are way too long. What science is now showing about how we should be structuring our off-site meetings and our virtual meetings? Guess what we're doing it all wrong.

Speaker 2:

This is the Lead in 30 podcast with Russ Hill. You cannot be serious. Strengthen your ability to lead in less than 30 minutes.

Speaker 1:

When I first got into the consulting business and I became an employee, right, an employee of a consulting firm and we had all of these clients and I mean big companies, right, so the biggest companies in the world, many of them we were consulting. And so I was put on these project teams and we had to set a curriculum that our consulting firm used the intellectual property right, Frameworks and models that had been developed over many, many, many years trying to solve the problems that organizations and executive teams were dealing with in trying to manage people, trying to get results and acquisitions and mergers and restructuring and adjusting strategies and trying to drive performance and build accountability and all of those sorts of things. And so when I went to work for the firm, they gave you very, very detailed instructions on how we were going to do things. I mean down to the down to details about whether or not you should have tables in the room, how the chair should be structured, microphones, about the music that you would play coming into and out of breaks, about every single detail, how to draw things on flip charts. I, literally, when I joined the firm, I had to draw some of our models on frameworks and frameworks on flip charts and then the founders and the leaders of the company rip them off. They're like nope, russ, do it again. Nope, that line is not straight. Nope, do it again. This is our intellectual property, russ. People are paying a lot of money for this. You can't draw it casually, and where you stand, and whether your back is to different people. I mean all of these details and and the reason that we did this, the reason that firm did that, is because we wanted to be world-class, the best in the business, down to every little detail.

Speaker 1:

And one of the things that was emphasized to us was the length of meetings. So, cause, our clients were paying a lot of money. Typically, you know, you'd have the executive team, or maybe you had 200, you know the top 200 in an organization, and then, a few times during the year, you'd have, um, uh, several thousand, a sales conference, you know all the sales managers for a global company or whatever it might be. And so we were we. We we were charging clients for, you know, ongoing engagements, and then part of this was these built-in meetings. This was before virtual meetings, like way back then. You remember, you remember way back then, when we didn't do virtual meetings, like four years ago. Like five years ago, I mean, it was like it feels like like you can't even remember life without virtual meetings, but it was like just yesterday that we weren't doing them. So if you're maybe 28, you can't remember that, or 27, you don't remember it, but for those of us that are, I've been around for a minute, we've forgotten about it. But in person meetings. So, anyway, our um, our CEO, discovered, found out that some of us in the firm were not running meetings from 8 AM to 5 PM. We were ending the meetings with the clients earlier, like three or four, and he wanted nothing to do with it. This was one of the co-founders at the time. And so there was this directive that went out to the organization of no, these companies are paying for a full day of an onsite meeting and you're to go to five. Do not end early. Give them the maximum amount, like you, you just. You just engage them all the way through. Amount Like you, just engage them all the way through. I could not have disagreed more. I was a problem child on this and you know what the science is in and guess what? I was right and you already know this anyway because you experience it in meetings, but we're going to talk about how this applies to virtual meetings that you run and you're a part of in your organization as well. We're doing it all wrong.

Speaker 1:

Welcome in to the Lead M30 podcast. In less than 30 minutes, we give you a framework, research, a model, a best practice, an example, a story, an experience that we've recently had as we're out in this leadership lab with executive teams of all these organizations, or things that we're learning as we are doing these, cohorts after cohort, with hundreds of leaders, and so you put those together back to back. You got thousands of leaders every month going through these and we share those findings and our experiences here in the lead in 30 podcasts in less than 30 minutes. In an episode, I am Russ Hill, I'm one of the co-founders of the firm and I just happen to be the spokesperson, the person with the microphone, for our podcast. You can find out more about the amazing work our team is doing and the amazing results our clients are getting, both on the consulting side as well as the off-the-shelf leadership training side at LoneRockio.

Speaker 1:

Lonerockio Our company is called LoneRock Leadership and, oh man, this is on my mind because I just well, for multiple reasons. Let me give you two. That just happened, and so the outcome of this episode is you're going to have research and data and I'm going to get you to think differently. I'm going to offer some thoughts for you to adjust how you do virtual meetings and how you do off sites. Some of you aren't involved in off sites, but as you climb in the org chart and you moved from organization to organization or you build your company or whatever it is, you're going to want to do off sites. They are a critical part of any leadership team. You've got to get out of the building.

Speaker 1:

We highly, highly, highly recommend because we see the effectiveness of it and most fortune 50 companies do this where they do an offsite once a quarter with the leadership team. There's no reason why, if you're halfway down the org chart or anywhere on that org chart, why you can't take your leadership team off site and do a meeting every quarter. You should be doing. It is what we would advocate, based on the impact. We'll get more into that in just a moment. You don't have to fly them away. You don't have to go to some elaborate place, but there's just so much data about how we think more creatively we get the attention of people in the meeting, when we're away from the facility and we go to some place that really stimulates our brain activity and that could be just simply, doesn't it be some exotic, beautiful place? It could just be a nice hotel ballroom, a nice meeting room.

Speaker 1:

I used to do it like when I had no budget and I was a lower level leader. I'd do it like at a at some meeting room, at a at some hotel. Anyway, let's, let's talk about these couple of experience I had recently. So I was in the in the Midwest with an executive team this is in the last few weeks and, um, and we, we had a meeting that was scheduled all day. It was supposed to end at 4 PM and so after lunch I went up to the uh, the senior executive who oversaw this team, and I asked him. I said, okay, we got a couple of options as we look toward the afternoon. Number one the first option is we go to four, because we're on everybody's calendar till four and we've got this thing and I, you know, I want to get to this topic and that topic that we've gotten into, we haven't gotten to yet, dig into deeper into that and have a conversation around it.

Speaker 1:

I said now the second option is we call this thing at like two 30 and we go. So we come back out of lunch and we go really focused for like an hour and a half or whatever it was. And uh, and then we cut everybody loose at two 30 and we leave them wanting more. And he didn't even hesitate and oh, I was so glad because we were perfectly aligned he said we're calling it at two 30, wrap it up at two 30, russ, you and your team, just let's leave them wanting more. And uh, and let let's's, let's cut it loose.

Speaker 1:

I could not have agreed more. Why? Why do I say that we don't? We, like, we've got all these people in the same room. Some of them travel, some of them, you know, depends on your organization too. We, we've got this great conversation going and it's because you, you have this. You know exactly what I'm talking about. And now the research and data points to it. And that is by two, 32 o'clock, three at the latest. You're dead, your brain stops working, you are, you want out, you're done. And so, from three to five, two to five, whatever it is, your meeting, our meetings are almost completely ineffective. Now there are a couple of things you can do to change that, and I'll give you another example. And both of these are offsite. Then I'm going to go to virtual in just a moment, because that's a big reality for all of us.

Speaker 1:

So our company just had two days of meetings. I flew back literally like a few hours ago. At the time I'm recording this, I just got back and to my home office. So day one was just the founders meeting was just really going through and updating strategy on a few things, pushing our thinking on a couple of things. We're crisscrossing the globe, we're all over the place. We're with different clients.

Speaker 1:

As the firm has grown, we don't work together on the same projects anymore and so all of our team is really dispersed, and that's just for bandwidth sake, because we've got so many clients that in different organizations and different projects that are going, and so we, we, uh, we want to make sure that. So we were, we were getting together for a full day. Well, um, that day was incredibly engaging because of we were creating which is a big thing, like a meeting. I'll get more to that the action items in just a second. The takeaways I don't I'm getting ahead of myself here, but the meeting was fully engaging and we finished up on day one around 10 o'clock at night, maybe 11.

Speaker 1:

And so now you're and, by the way, then day two, we had some of the leaders of our company, some of the folks that lead up the training side of our organization, with lead in 30. And then the three new courses that we rolled out in the last few months of of decide in 30, of adapt in 30 and power in 30, these three new courses that are just oh my gosh. We thought there was going to be demand in the marketplace for it. We had no idea. And so, like there's just the amount of work that's going on in our organization, the additional team members that we're having to to bring on to handle the demand around those three new courses is off the charts. People who've been through lead in 30 are like, oh my gosh, clarity, alignment, movement that's amazing, or whatever. Whatever they get these results, and like the the amount of change that's happening in our industry or in our company or out there. We've got to better equip our managers to be able to deal with it anyway. So we're building, we're, we're building some of the strategies around different things and executing, and how are we going to meet market demand? And yada, yada, yada. That was day two. So we've got additional people it's not just the founders, it's now a broader team and then some outsiders and different things that we invited.

Speaker 1:

So that day meeting went from. It went all day. We ended at four. Everybody was engaged. We could have gone longer, but we did a few. We did a few things. We did a few things that made us stay engaged that late, and then with some members of the team, we went till 11, 11 pm and it was a full day.

Speaker 1:

Well, how, russ, these seem to be contradictions. You're telling me about this meeting in the Midwest where you're telling the senior executive let's cut it at 2.30. And then you tell me that you can go all day into late at night. How does that work? Okay, here's the takeaway.

Speaker 1:

And, by the way, there's a bunch of research, and let me quote just a few of them. So one of these studies is Microsoft, what they call their human factors lab, where they actually used EEGs and they monitored brain activity. They monitored stress levels of people in meetings. Another study that we've been looking at is the Journal of Occupational Health, psychology and cognitive engagement levels in meetings, virtually and on site. And then the last study that we've spent a lot of time looking at is the MIT Sloan remote meeting study. All of these are within the last few years. Two of the three were within the last 12 months and I'm going to share with you the findings, the scientific research driven brain science studies, and it's going to back up everything you already know. And so why aren't we adjusting? So here's I'm going to stay at the offsite or the full day meeting and then I'm going to go virtual in just a minute.

Speaker 1:

A lot of you who aren't doing offsites I want, I want you to have this data so you can, you can adjust how offsites that you're a part of, you can suggest this to your boss or when you're doing an offsite, you, you, you know what the science shows. Here's what one of the things that we found is you don't go all day, you, you take massive breaks, and a few things that I would. I would throw at you that I'm going to go relatively quick and stay at a high level on, because I've got to do this in less than 30 minutes and we could do this. We could take literally like two hours and barely cover the surface on this. So one of the ways that we've really worked on engagement at our off sites is we don't to start an offsite. Why? Because the concern, the issue. There's a couple of reasons. The concern that most people coming to your offsite have is oh my gosh, I've got so much going on. How am I going to stay up to date with the emails, the calls, the different things, the projects that I've got done? I've got to get that to a client, all those sorts of things. So you create the offsite with time for them to work on them, so they can get up at 7 am, 6 am, whatever it is, and they've got that first hour of the workday from eight to nine to get stuff done. And so let them get stuff done.

Speaker 1:

Start at 10, start at nine in our company on day one. Typically we did a little bit different this week because of the volume of what we needed to get to, but typically we we split the two-day off sites um over the two days and we start at noon on day one, noon at day one, and the reason is we go noon to four or noon to five. We take a few, but you had the whole morning to do work. You had the whole morning to, to, to get things done, and then and then we're start, and then the engagement and the endorphin rush and the dopamine and all that comes from being in person and in the same room and ideas that, that, that that's all hitting in the afternoon and and by the time you're getting tired, four or five hours in, we're done. We're done with it.

Speaker 1:

Okay, the other reason to not start at 8 am and to start at 9 or 10, beyond what I just said is to allow people to go to breakfast and network together to be able to have interaction. Now our recommendation to you would be don't schedule that. Don't make it an on-demand thing, because that's part of it. You think that, oh, we're having breakfast for an hour, people can do whatever, and then we're having this social activity and then we're going to go to Topgolf or we're going to go drive race cars, and then you've taken my schedule. I'm with you from 7 am with the breakfast, or 730, till nine o'clock at night.

Speaker 1:

You fried me, even though we're doing active things and it's social or whatever. You told like you know, like the active stuff is good and that, and team building and all that, but I need breaks to get away from everybody. I need breaks to get things done. I want to go back to my hotel room. I want to go have a one-on-one meeting with this person or that person. I want to go outside and brainstorm. I want to. I want some time to schedule some time with that person and the other functional area to just talk. I want to just talk. I want to go find somebody and go do something where I'm catching up with them about how they're doing in life and ask them about, you know, their long-term plan. Are they going to stay with the company? How are they feeling about this? Dig into different things, and I can't do that at these big social events, whether it's breakfast or go-kart racing or whatever else.

Speaker 1:

And so don't take all of my time. If you want my best ideas, you want my best energy, you want this to be a source of energy for everybody in that first day, take four or five hours. That includes the meal that everybody comes to, that includes the activity or whatever else. That's it. That's it. Watch what happens. I promise you, if you have an offsite and let's say you have 20 people coming or you have 400, give them three to four or five hours of free time during that day and then ask for feedback. I promise you you will get an enormous amount of positive feedback, an enormous amount, and then you start the next day. So let's then then you do the same thing in day two.

Speaker 1:

The other option to this which we've tried in our company, our firm, based on what we've seen, best practices and other organizations, and we loved it and we saw the difference in energy level, the difference in ideation, the different level and engagement, that the other model is you start at noon or one. On day one, you go till four. You give people their evening. You might have a short activity, short an hour or two, like quick, don't take the whole evening. You might love it, they don't. And then and there are some people who will, but there are a lot of people who don't and they can't get as much done and then day two, start at nine, not eight, start at nine, go to noon or one, and then you're done. That's it. Less is more, less is more. Now let's talk about virtual, and then I'm going to back up the science and share with you a few of the findings in a minute.

Speaker 1:

Virtual meetings is virtual meetings. We just do not have tolerance for these to go long and and and the takeaway, the punchline from all of the all of the research, again, what you already know is these back to back to back virtual meetings are the death of your organization. If you want to watch engagement dip, if you want to watch ideation plummet, if you want to watch burnout skyrocket, schedule long virtual meetings and create a culture where people have back to back to back to back to back virtual meetings, it's death. It's not productive. You think it's productive. You look at schedules.

Speaker 1:

I look at somebody in our firm's schedule and they're working from home that day and I see three meetings, virtually for a half hour each on their calendar and I think that's a productive employee, that's an engaged person. I look at somebody's calendar. You know how you can see each other's calendars in a company, right, and I look at somebody's calendar and I see eight virtual meetings, six virtual meetings with no break or very little break in between, and I think that's a burned out employee, that's someone who we're not getting the best from. That's somebody who's going to be struggling, right, and in so many companies the culture is the opposite. It's a badge of courage. Look at my calendar it's full of virtual meetings. I am so important, yeah, and you're not generating much, you're not ideating, you're not connecting with people, you're not sitting and thinking alone, you're not problem solving, you're not digging deep into the projects, you're not taking us into the future. So what's the ideal? So the number of virtual meetings in a day limit, limit it.

Speaker 1:

And one way to do this a hack, if you want to get super tactical is you look at your schedule a few days out and it depends on your organization and you create buffers. So you've got a meeting that popped up virtual depends on your organization and you create buffers. So you've got a meeting that popped up virtual meeting on your calendar at 8 AM. So the next two hours you put a, you, you put an appointment on your calendar and outlook or whatever. You block it off and, depending on your organization, if anybody challenges you on that, leave the company. Like, like, let's just be real, somebody's looking at that and go. Well, what are those two things Like that, like you don't want to work for that boss? Do they not trust you? Are they going to micromanage it that much? Like? And if you don't have the space or ability to build that in.

Speaker 1:

And I'm not saying that there aren't weeks where you're overloaded. Yeah, that happens, that and that's going to happen. But I'm talking about week in, week out. Let that be the outlier, the exception where it's back to back to back to back. We're all going to have that in occasional weeks. If that's every week, you're done, You're done.

Speaker 1:

And so put block out two hours, block out an hour, so no one can grab that. They see that you're busy and then, and then you've got the next virtual meeting or whatever it is, and then block it out, block the calendar out. I do that in our organization. That time's just not available because I want, when we connect, I want to be at my best If you're right after the next one or whatever. Whatever you're not going to get the best.

Speaker 1:

Okay, what's the ideal length of a virtual meeting? 30 minutes. All the data suggests it. 30 minutes is ideal. Um surveys show that. The, the, the academic research that's been done on and there's been a ton on virtual meetings show that. Now you think well, I've got 10 people on this, we can't go 30 minutes. Or I've got a one-on-one with somebody and we need an hour. Okay, go an hour, but just know that engagement levels start to dip after 30 minutes, according to all the brain research and there's lots of reasons for that. You can just search for it in chat, gpt or any place else you want to AI will spit out all a bunch of crap that's related to this for you If you want to dig deeper in it, if you want to verify any of it and and and. So what if I've got a team meeting, so I've got 20 people, or I've got 40 people, or I've got a cross-functional meeting that we have Do not go longer than 90 on the high end. Like, let's say it's exception, you got to go longer. They're like this big thing and we're getting all these people, or whatever it is, two hours max. Two hours max, these four hour.

Speaker 1:

We actually have other companies in our space that certify, you know, like, like we certify people to be able to facilitate, lead in 30 or adapt in 30 internally, like these are HR, l and D leaders, that sort of thing, right, and? And so we certify them to where they can deliver our IP, our content, structured in the scientifically backed, highly engaged way that we do it with blended learning and a cohort and all that stuff, right. So we certify people in that. Other companies that certify people in content, they do these certification meetings that are eight hours virtually, six hours, virtually Are you insane? That is our. Our certification is two hours one day, virtually. Two hours the next day, virtually. There is no way we're taking you past the two hour mark. You people are not listening their, their, their capacity, called cognitive overload, right, that that's a huge thing.

Speaker 1:

And then these, these, uh, these stress levels that happen. So let me give you a little bit of the re. So. So, frequency of virtual meetings no more than three or four day. Look at your people's calendars. What's the norm in your organization? If everybody's got them stacked like boom boom, boom, boom over you, like that's a, do not be surprised when you get the employee engagement scores back. Do not be surprised when you're not innovating. Do not be surprised when you've got all these sorts of things right. That, that is too, that's a, that that is a warning sign for you.

Speaker 1:

So, um, let's just share, bullet point real quick, a couple of these studies. So microsoft human factors lab, this, uh, brainwave study that they did. They, they put eegs on people and then have them go to back-to-back virtual meetings. The stress level that they showed was enormous. What? What they recommended? Instead of giving you a ton of data about this study, what I'll tell you is they said break it. Everything I've advocated came out is related to their study and others and our own experience, but the data shows it. The science backs it up. They suggested a minimum of 10 minute breaks between meetings if they have to be back to back, but the real solution is an hour or two between them and only about three a day. Let's talk about the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. What they showed was that prolonged cognitive engagement in meetings creates mental underload and mental overload. This is the research, research.

Speaker 1:

One of the research things on these off-sites are long meetings and the cognitive underload. Like I when I first saw that term described, as I'm like what does underload mean? And what it means is you're bored. You've tuned out so many of these off-sites that we go to in organizations. They spend the time doing briefings. Hey, let's have accounting, do this, we're going to take an hour on that. And then marketing is going to spend two hours updating. And then HR is going to do the employee engagement score updates and then we're going to spend an hour after lunch where sales updates us on this and then research and development is going to take two hours and like just get all sharp objects away from me. That is death. There's not a C single executive on your team that likes that. That's not the way to get engagement. Yes, you have briefings, but they can't look like that. You're experiencing under load, which is okay.

Speaker 1:

I have checked out and so that what, the what, what the brain activity showed is just okay. It depletes. This is what happens at 2 PM. At 3 PM, I'm like, oh, I'm just out of it. Overload is I'm actually tuned in. So the cognitive overload is I'm actually tuned in and paying attention and my capacity to store or process everything that's come at me today in this long offsite meeting or in this two and a half hour virtual meeting, it's done.

Speaker 1:

There's no more room in the cup for more water. Stop pouring it in. That's what was so brilliant about the executive in the Midwest a week or two ago. Two, 30, guess what? We're leaving in the in the cup more room. So people walk out energized like, wow, number one, thanks for giving me some time back. That I wasn't expecting. That's a huge win. And number two, I'm wow. I could have gone for another two or three hours. I've got more juice left in me. Yep, we're good. They walk out of there on fire. You should have seen the energy level in these people. And so this that that is what I'd have you think about.

Speaker 1:

The length of your meetings, the frequency of them virtually off-site all of that. Our meetings are too long, we're pushing too much into them and we need the CEO, bless his heart. That told us to go till five was wrong. I started ending the meetings early Two o'clock, three o'clock. You know what happened. I got invited back more and more. Those accounts, those accounts expanded.

Speaker 1:

His approach was wrong. The shorter meeting actually led to more engagement, less people feeling energized and my contracts, my engagement with these organizations. They were like russ. We want the team back. We'll come back like we need to do. Can you be back in 30 days? Come back, we're like we need to do it. Can you be back in 30 days? As opposed to, his theory was well, we go to five and they're going to feel. They're going to feel like wow, we gave them so much, so much value that they're going to know they were done. They had tuned out at two or three. Anyway, you get the point. That is what's on my mind in this episode of the lead in 30 podcast share this episode with a colleague, your team or a friend.

Speaker 2:

Tap on the share button and text the link. Thanks for listening to the lead in 30 podcast with russ hill.