Employees engage in two kinds of work. There’s the work they do while sitting at their desks: writing lines of code, drawing designs, writing copy, closing deals. And then there’s the time spent talking about work: sitting in meetings, nodding at bosses, trying not to fall asleep, and thinking about lunch. That second type of “work” is growing. According to some studies, executives would spend less than ten hours a week in meeting rooms in the 1960s. Today, they can expect to stare at Powerpoints for nearly 23 hours a week. The higher in the company you rise, the more time you’ll spend in the meeting room and the less time you’ll spend at your desk. One long-term study found that CEOs attend an average of 37 meetings each week. They take up 72 percent of the 62.5 hours they spend at work each week. And those meetings can be long. Only 30 percent of a CEO’s meetings last less than an hour. Thirty-eight percent drag into a second hour or more.
The researchers recommended making meetings shorter but they could also be made more effective. Other studies have looked into ways to ensure that meetings, however long they’re held, are productive and worthwhile. They come down to encouraging participants to be prepared to say what’s on their mind.
In the Meeting Room, Everyone’s Opinion Must Be Equal
One problem affecting the productivity of meetings is that they’re not just places where opinions and ideas are shared and assessed. They’re also places where employees are judged. A staff member who hears their manager express an idea in a meeting will think twice before pointing out the flaws in their plan. No one likes to be contradicted, and certainly not in a public setting. Studies have found that that employees “surface act” in workplace meetings. They mask negative emotions and fake positive emotions.
“Employees might, for example, choose to conceal their fears and frustrations regarding organizational changes that are discussed in workplace meetings, in favor of putting on a smile to avoid upsetting or offending others, particularly their ‘higher-ups,’ such as supervisors and other organizational leaders,” explains one group of researchers.
If a low-level staff member is pressed during a meeting for an opinion, for example, they’ll repeat what one of their bosses said. If they have insight of their own—the effect of restructuring on staff morale or the amount of time it will really take to complete a task—they’ll keep that information to themselves if they think it would meet with disapproval from superiors.
The result is that the employees get to keep their jobs but the company is deprived of valuable information, and the meeting has wasted time.
The researchers investigated. They distributed surveys to 211 office employees at an American construction materials company. The employees completed the surveys at the end of each of five meetings, answering questions about the purpose of the meeting and the attendees. They also rated the meeting’s effectiveness, their feelings of psychological safety—the perception that the environment is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—and the amount of surface acting that they performed. One of the questions, for example, asked if they had pretended to be in a good mood during the meeting.
What they found was that employees do indeed “surface act” during meetings especially when their bosses were in the room. The lower the level of psychological safety in the meeting, the less employees felt that they could say what was on their mind without suffering repercussions—and the more everyone pretended to agree.
The cause of that psychological risk is the lack of equality in a meeting attended by people of different rank. One solution might be to hold meetings of peers, excluding supervisors or managers, then appointing one person to present the group’s combined view to the next level up. In practice, that’s likely to lead to a duplication of meetings and a difficulty in describing a topic of discussion without introducing a managerial preference. If team members at one level know what their manager thinks, they may be tempted to support that manager’s opinion as a way of avoiding responsibility for their own.
Instead of removing higher-ups from meetings, the researchers recommend reinforcing the psychological safety. Attendees should be told that in the meeting room there is no rank and that everyone’s opinion carries the same weight. Techniques to reinforce that equality during the meeting include acknowledging the contributions made by people in the room regardless of corporate rank, and listening to everyone without interrupting. Meeting participants might have different status but all opinions must be equal.
Even changing the furniture can help. In his book, Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Ed Catmull, head of Pixar, noticed that meetings held in the company’s large conference room were largely unproductive. The table in the room had been chosen by one of Steve Jobs’s favorite designers. “It was long and skinny, like one of those things you’d see in a comedy sketch about an old wealthy couple that sits down for dinner—one person at either end, a candelabra in the middle—and has to shout to make conversation,” he says.
Thirty people would attend the meetings, sitting in two long rows opposite each other. People who sat at the ends of the table struggled to make eye contact and were largely left out of the discussion. It was when one meeting was held in a small room, around a square table, that John Lasseter, Pixar’s then-Chief Creative Officer, noticed that the exchange of ideas was more free-flowing, the eye contact automatic. “Every person there, no matter their job title, felt free to speak up.”
Out went Steve Jobs’s designer’s table, and in came psychological safety and better meetings.
Leave Room for Doubt
Even when there is psychological safety though, people with differing views in a meeting may still feel pressured to join the majority. In a seminal 1952 experiment, researchers asked groups of eight people to match the length of a line to one of three other lines of different lengths. Each member of the group had to announce their decision publicly. During the test, one volunteer—the subject of the test—would always find himself in a minority of one. (The other members of the group had been told to stand in unanimous opposition). The correct answer was always clear but the subject of the experiment would feel caught between what he could see for himself and what everyone else was telling him. The experiment then measured how often people changed their opinion in response to the pressure of the majority.
The researchers found that a third of the answers the subjects of the experiment gave were wrong. They had either repeated or been influenced by the majority opinion. The results varied though. About a quarter of the subjects remained steadfastly independent, insisting that two lines matched even when everyone else insisted it did not. A third of the subjects went with the majority in at least half of the trials.
In interviews with test subjects after the experiment, one subject who had stated his own opinion in every test rationalized his opposition by saying: “I called them as I saw them.” A subject who had wrongly sided with the majority in eleven of the twelve trials put his decision down to a lack of confidence. “If they had been doubtful I probably would have changed, but they answered with such confidence,” he said.
It’s a fascinating study that provides a couple of lessons to bear in mind before holding a company meeting.
The first is that people differ. Some people will always be willing to speak up even if everyone stands against them. Those are the people you want in your meetings—and in your company.
The second is that what distinguishes those people is not insight or even confidence. The person who tended to go with his opinion even when everyone was against him wasn’t convinced that he was right. He would tell the rest of the group: “You’re probably right, but you may be wrong!” He felt enough psychological safety to be willing to be wrong himself.
He was right because he was prepared to be wrong.
That’s something a business can encourage by not punishing people when they oppose the majority, even when they’re wrong. Employees might worry that if they state an opinion that turns out to be false they’ll be seen as incompetent or not worth employing. Instead it should be made clear that all opinions are welcome—and that ideas that turn out to be wrong are part of the route to being right. You can’t reach the right decision unless you’re prepared to countenance wrong ones.
The other thing you can do is to lower the confidence that underpins other suggestions. The subject who tended to go with the majority said that he would have stated what he really thought had everyone else expressed doubts. Because the other seven members of the group had stated boldly that the matching line was definitely one, two, or three, he put aside his own doubts and went along. Had they softened their opinion—had they said that they only thought the answer was one, two or three—he would have offered a different opinion.
Opinions expressed in meetings should come with that same level of doubt. If a decision were easy it would already have been made so no idea presented at a meeting can be expressed in complete confidence. Encourage participants to preface their opinions with qualifiers such as “I think” or “I believe” to leave room for that potential to be wrong and provide space for others to offer alternative thoughts.
What People Hear When You Say Nothing
People don’t always go with the flow, however. Often, people will choose to say nothing in a meeting. But does that mean they agree with the majority and have nothing more to add? Or does it mean that they oppose the majority but are afraid to say so?
What do people think you believe when you choose not to state your opinion?
Researchers have conducted tests into the interpretation of silence too. Theyrecruited 178 volunteers and told them to imagine that four people at a restaurant were trying a new brand of bottled water. As they waited for their food, two of the diners talked about the new water. The other two said nothing. In one of the test conditions, those two diners were even away from the table when the discussion took place.
The researchers then told the observers what they should think about the water, and asked them what they thought the people who hadn’t expressed an opinion believed.
The results varied. If the diners were away from the table during the conversation, the volunteers interpreted their “silence” as agreement with the other two diners—even if the observers themselves had been told that they didn’t agree. Like the previous experiment, they assumed that the diners would have agreed with the majority.
But if the diners were at the table, listening to the discussion without stating an opinion, the observers filled that silence with their opinions. If the observers had been told that they liked the new water, they thought the silent diners liked it too even if the other diners hadn’t liked it. They interpreted the silence as an unwillingness to disagree.
The different combinations make this complex but the point is that your silence is always filled, and it’s filled with someone else’s opinion. Say nothing in a meeting and everyone else will assume that you agree with them. That’s useful if you really don’t want people to know what you think. It’s useless for a meeting which depends on people being willing to express what they think.
Meetings need to be held in an atmosphere of psychological safety. Everyone in the meeting room must be equal and all opinions must he heard without ridicule and stated with enough doubt to allow for disagreement. And everyone must speak up and say what’s on their mind… unless they’re secretly thinking about what to eat for lunch.
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