If You Cancel a Meeting With the Boss At This Company, Something Odd Happens It's not what you think.
By Sarah Kellogg Neff Edited by Frances Dodds
Key Takeaways
- How to improve company culture.
- Meetings are here to serve us. We're not here to serve them.
This story appears in the September 2023 issue of BIZ Experiences. Subscribe »
At the company I lead, anyone can opt out of any meeting, at any time, for any reason — even if it's with me. Zero judgment. Zero repercussions.
The way I see it, meetings are more than just gatherings of people; they are structures to build healthy respect for people's time and talents. I want those ideals to be core to my company.
Also, let's face it: Most meetings suck.
As they're currently conducted, meetings trigger a forceful undercurrent related to our worth. How and when meetings are requested, accepted, or run (and by whom) have an outsized impact on our sense of value.
When did meetings become so fraught with subtext? And more urgently: Does it have to be this way? The answer is an unequivocal no. Let's unpack.
As CEO of The Lactation Network, part of my job is to shape our company culture. In its simplest form, I believe that "company culture" is what it feels like to be part of an organization. How do you feel when you turn on your computer in the morning? Do you feel rested? Are you looking forward to something? When you log off at night, did you accomplish something? Do you have permission to rest?
Related: Meeting Culture' Is Costing Companies $101 Million a Year
I've learned that improving company culture starts with an honest exploration of what's true about your culture today, identifying the attributes of the culture you want and why, and then aligning every aspect of the company toward that aspiration. This alignment starts with job descriptions and runs right on through the hiring process, onboarding, and perhaps the hardest part: day-to-day, on-the-job expectations.
That's where meetings come in.
Years ago, I worked at digital agencies where I was tasked with operationalizing creativity: How could I capture the brilliant, busy minds in the room and get their neurons firing as quickly as possible? How could I set them up to be successful and consistently demonstrate respect for their time?
In the process of building that framework, I realized meetings rarely had their intended effect. Political and professional maneuvers often came at the cost of efficiency — and revealed we're all still clamoring to be picked, noticed, needed.
For many companies, these virtual or in-person rooms are filled with unspoken cultural nuance or raucous, haphazard posturing that often leaves employees feeling disoriented, frustrated, and disrespected.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Meetings are here to serve us. We're not here to serve them. Our work only works when our meetings work — for us, not against us.
Related: How to Stop Meetings From Killing Your Startup
What if meetings were a fundamentally flexible device? What if we got to decide whether a meeting is the best use of our time…not our bosses? What if we got to determine what purpose a meeting serves ahead of time, and could hold attendees accountable for arriving at our agreed-upon destination? What if every single employee, no matter their title, got to check in to ask, "Is this one-on-one/all-hands/recurring meeting still serving us?"
If these questions don't feel like ones you and your team have the agency to ask, then you've got a problem. Meeting culture is a mirror to the values your company holds about who (and whose time) matters. And if we start with the assumption that everyone's time matters, then everyone deserves a say in how they best contribute to their teams.
I get it. There's a difference between a 70-person operation like mine and large corporations. We're nimble, and folks throughout our company get to see me model these meeting practices in real time. But calibrating meeting culture is less about what size your business is and more about a commitment to breaking hierarchy stigmas reinforced by poor meeting culture. It's tough — but most worthwhile things are.
