The problem of how to run a good meeting is solved. Everyone and their dog has an idea of how to design and lead a decent meeting.

The meeting culture problem remains a greener field. Run one good meeting? Sure, no problem.

Get everyone in every department running decent meetings every day for years on end? Wow, ok. That's a higher bar.

Meeting culture projects involve a team that makes a lot of design decisions and sets up systems to support those designs. Their goal is to make running good meetings so easy and natural that people choosing to run lousy ones will stick out like pimples on a prom date.

In our last few articles, we looked at how people become interested in a meeting culture project. During our September conversation with Rebecca Hinds and Carrie Goucher, we ran out of time before getting to another question:

Let's start by recognizing what that journey looks like.

For several years running, “too much time wasted in unproductive meetings” was the top complaint in the employee engagement survey at a large global company.

They brought us in. We began with a company-wide keynote on the five aspects of effective meeting cultures. Interest was so high that the first session exceeded the company’s available licenses: even the CEO couldn’t get in. We delivered the keynote a second time so everyone could participate, and they stashed a recording with their training materials.

Then, we moved from awareness to redesign.

We ran a diagnostic survey to understand how employees experienced the organization’s meeting habits: what was working, where time was being lost, and which practices were getting in the way.

Then we worked with 40 of the company’s top leaders to redesign how meetings worked across their departments. Together, they developed:

Yes, they learned how to design and run a better meeting, but they put far more effort into creating a shared operating system for when to meet, how to meet, and how to move information and work forward without a meeting.

After the project, they looked at the engagement data again.

In the first employee survey after the work began, complaints about meetings dropped significantly. In the next survey, they dropped again. In the third, there were zero negative employee comments about meetings at all, and this persisted for several years after the project ended.

My direct experience with the organization ended after the project. I learned about the engagement survey results when the person who hired us back then asked if we could help her new organization.

And I'm very aware that an absence of complaints isn't proof of excellence. Engagement survey comments are a lagging indicator. By the time meeting problems show up consistently in the comments, they’ve been frustrating people for a while.

But in large organizations, those comments provide valuable organization-wide signals. For a group where complaints about bad meetings once topped the charts, then disappeared and stayed gone after a redesign, this is meaningful evidence that the improvements are holding.

All beautifully organized systems naturally slide towards disorder. You combat meeting culture entropy just like you do for your kitchen or your desktop: through intentional effort.

That effort becomes sustainable when it's built into the company’s infrastructure. For our client, this meant that the guidelines were posted and referenced. The keynote remained available internally and was included in new-hire onboarding, and the company maintained an internal site explaining how to put those ideas into practice.

Early in our firm's practice, we found the same kinds of organization-wide support in the enviable meeting cultures we studied, and we've seen our successful clients build on these examples.

They have all built in support for a healthy meeting culture by establishing:

This seems pretty obvious on the surface: to maintain a standard, you must have a standard to begin with.

The part that is not so obvious: generic definitions won't do.
Every organization needs to know what "good" looks like for them specifically.

Some craft meetings that people find meaningful. They focus on deeply connecting every gathering to their organizational purpose. Others aim to protect individual productivity, freeing as much time from meetings as possible.
These are both reasonable design standards, and imply very different implementations.

In practice, this means documented templates and/or training on how to lead the handful of important meetings each leader faces. We consider a meeting high-impact if it:

a) Serves a critical function in a key business process.
Examples: the deal-closing sales meeting, or the triage call when responding to a critical incident.

OR

b) Happens frequently enough to make a significant cumulative impact on organizational time and resources. Weekly team cadence meetings are the #1 candidate here.

Ideally, new employees will experience good meetings on their first day, but that's not enough to ensure they're ready to help actively maintain that quality going forward. Great meeting cultures set explicit expectations that they take their meeting quality seriously and expect every employee to do the same.

Every new employee needs at least one onboarding experience that makes these expectations clear.

Leaders need more. New leaders will arrive who don't understand what all these good meetings get them. (See the story about Intel here). They'll need exposure to the larger system and the thinking behind the design. Then, when they suggest changes, they'll have the background needed to own any consequences.

Great meeting cultures have a way to tell when their meetings aren't so great. They cultivate an intolerance for subpar meetings.

This is a lot easier to do when the quality standard is clear, everyone knows the standard, and there's a way to know whether meetings achieve that standard.

You may have heard me complain about facilitators setting “norms” at the beginning of a workshop and wondered why I’m advocating for meeting quality standards here. Isn’t a standard just another norm?

My objection to in-the-moment norms is that I’ve never once seen a facilitator check themselves or the group against them. They declare the norms, then later survey whether people enjoyed themselves and would recommend the workshop to their friends.

A useful standard closes the loop. You actively evaluate performance against it and make corrections when you’re falling short.

For large organizations, that might mean analytics and surveys. For smaller groups, it could be as simple as a quick ROTI check every now and then. Whatever the mechanism, you need some way of evaluating and correcting performance if you want meetings to perform.

Have you found yourself in a room with that guy who insists on running meetings exactly the way he was taught? I've seen this guy dogmatically insist that every meeting start by silently reading reports, as Jeff Bezos says. I've seen his doppelgänger insist that every standup must answer the same three pre-defined questions in exactly 15 minutes, while standing.

That's the surest way to strangle the life out of a vibrant meeting culture. To keep meeting quality high, organizations focus on preserving their capacity to make good design choices, rather than dogmatically carrying forward past designs.

Great meeting cultures anticipate change. Organizations restructure, technologies advance, markets oscillate, and leaders swap out.

Like a kitchen, meeting systems mostly need regular sprucing up. And sometimes, you need to do a bit of re-organizing.

At other times, you look around and find your kitchen (or meeting calendar) overloaded with far too many things that simply don't fit in the space you have. An explosion of ad hoc meetings is often a sign that the organization’s operating model no longer fits the work. Circumstances may demand a full remodel.

The best meeting cultures use regular maintenance and small updates to keep pace with change, making big, disruptive overhauls less frequent.

Don't you love how articles can boil down hundreds of design decisions involving dozens of people into a tiny list?

If you aren't at all fooled and think that really, this looks like a lot of work, you're right.

But it's probably not as much work as you think.

We worked with the company in the story for a little over four months. After an initial kickoff, we met with their design group for 90 minutes every two weeks. Every member of the team held a leadership role. They implemented the designs alongside their normal responsibilities. From this core group, it took some time for the changes to ripple out to all of their 18k + employees, but not nearly as much as you might think when changing a habit that touched every one of them every day.

Would their specific approach work for you? Maybe. Meeting cultures differ.

I wouldn’t say that we have “a solution” to the meeting culture problem. We do have enough insight to navigate the territory well.

What I do know is this:
It is possible to create a healthy meeting culture. More than one organization has done it, including some pretty big ones. Each meeting culture operates differently, and each addresses these five needs. And, with some intentional effort, we've seen that quality sustained for many years.