About This Episode
Meeting culture is one of the most overlooked yet costly dysfunctions in modern organizations. In this episode of The Future of Work® Podcast, Daniel Lamadrid was joined by Rebecca Hinds, PhD—organizational behavior expert and author of Your Best Meeting Ever—to speak about why meetings persist despite being widely disliked, and how leaders can transform them into powerful tools for progress.
Drawing on research from Stanford, Worklytics, and her experience founding the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, Rebecca explains how visibility bias, meeting debt, and hybrid dysfunction are driving calendar overload and burnout. She introduces practical frameworks like the 4D Test (Decide, Debate, Discuss, Develop), Meeting Doomsday, and Return on Time Investment (ROTI) to help leaders and teams reset their collaboration systems.
As AI alters how we work, Rebecca challenges organizations to use technology intentionally—freeing meetings for the deeply human work of creativity, trust-building, and decision-making. This episode is a masterclass in designing meeting culture that truly advances business outcomes in the future of work.
About Rebecca Hinds
Rebecca Hinds, PhD is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done. She is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work. She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work—from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI implementation and organizational change.
What You’ll Learn
- Why meetings persist even when everyone agrees they’re dysfunctional
- The “visibility bias” that equates presence with productivity
- What a “Meeting Doomsday” is and how to implement one
- How the 4D Test determines whether a meeting deserves to exist
- Why 10+ hours per week in meetings triggers negative consequences
- The hidden cost of “meeting hangovers”
- How AI is amplifying meeting dysfunction and how to avoid it
- Why meetings should be reserved for deeply human work
- How to create psychological safety around declining bad meetings
- The difference between outputs (busy calendars) and outcomes (business impact)
Transcript
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:00:00,000 ]What I expect to happen if folks aren’t intentional is more bad meetings, more dysfunctional meetings, because we’re using AI as a crutch for work that we should be doing as humans.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:00:12,330 ] Welcome, Rebecca, to the Future of Work podcast. I’m really excited to have you here. How are you?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:00:16,840 ] I’m doing well. Thank you so much for having me.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:00:19,500 ] I was really excited ever since we started the process of this chat with you because we’re going to be talking about something that I believe. Everyone, especially managers, people leading other people, struggle with, which is meetings.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:00:37,070 ] Do we have too many? Are there not enough? Who should be in which? Are they taking up space? And so I am really, really excited to. talk about this with you especially since you recently wrote your best meeting ever, your book, and I kind of want to know what sparked your focus on on writing this is it from personal experience? Do you see meetings as a core fault in the way we work today? Tell me a little bit more about that.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:01:07,190 ] Sure. I think there are several reasons. One, I’ve always been fascinated by organizational design. And I grew up, I was a competitive swimmer and was always fascinated by the science of teamwork. In athletics and then in organizations. How is it that— you can create a group of people where the sum is greater than the individual parts.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:01:31,830 ] That has always fascinated me. And meetings are so interesting because they’re ubiquitous. They’re arguably the most common, certainly collaboration practice that we engage in day to day. And yet they’re highly, highly dysfunctional. And why is it that, you know, for decades and decades, we cling to this work practice that we know is highly dysfunctional. We often despise and dislike meetings, and yet we continue to deploy them very, very frequently.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:02:04,670 ] practitioner perspective and an employee perspective, that’s deeply frustrating. But from an academic perspective, it’s certainly very fascinating to understand, okay, why is it? Why is it that we continue to cling to this practice we know is broken and at the core of it, not surprisingly. is a lot of human-human innate tendencies and biases that push us to cling to this practice.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:02:31,450 ] Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. And I believe that’s the case. Tell me if you agree. More within remote working environments.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:02:41,460 ] I believe because I think that when people are working remotely, at least this happens to me. I’m going to be really truthful here. We tend to want to interact with people. Right and how can we do that in a remote setting? Well, meetings, meetings, meetings, and a lot of those are, you know, like when people say, ‘this meeting could have been an email I sometimes say that about my own meetings. Right, but like consciously or subconsciously, I’m like, ‘I want to see people, I want to talk to them.’ Um, But I don’t know. I mean.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:03:13,230 ] It’s fascinating. And there are aspects of the remote work environment that make meetings more efficient and more effective, but there are also a lot of aspects. And in particular, we see this in hybrid work environments where remote workers often are treated like second-class citizens. And the reason for that primarily is— we have a visibility bias as humans. It’s innate in our DNA. We associate visibility with value, presence with productivity. And despite overwhelming research and evidence that remote work works for productivity, we continue to cling to these outdated biases and innate biases. And because of that, meetings are so interesting because they’re highly, highly visible. Most of the work we do is highly invisible. You can’t really see someone thinking deeply, working on a strategy, coaching a teammate. But you can absolutely often see. Someone’s calendar, or someone in a conference room, or that Zoom screen.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:04:18,399 ] And often what I find, and this is often true of remote workers, is often true of people who are new to the organization or more junior. If they’re not sure or they’re uncertain— as to whether they’re contributing enough to the organization—meetings become a highly visible way to show that productivity and progress, regardless of whether anything happens in the meeting. And we all feel it. Look at someone’s calendar and they’re double booked or triple booked. You know, our association is wow. This person must be important. They must probably have high status within the organization.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:04:54,330 ] And it’s very, very dangerous because we’re using the meeting to use the meeting rather than to move work forward. We’re using the meeting to show. To show some perception that we’re hoping others will glean from our packed calendar as opposed to using it very intentionally for the purpose of moving work forward.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:05:16,890 ] So what I’m getting from this, this is fascinating and everything you’re saying. Maybe some people are using meetings as an excuse to actually do work.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:05:27,120 ] Yeah, well, yeah, well, work. I would use in in quotation marks. Right, it’s it’s a it’s a It’s a. It’s an attempt to showcase that you are doing. Work, you know, broadly within the organization, as opposed to, you know, often we conflate outcomes with outputs. Outputs, you know, is packed calendar.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:05:52,730 ] Gone and sat through five meetings in the day rather than have you actually advanced your business goals or have you actually advanced the business KPIs?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:06:03,140 ] It’s a very dangerous connotation because it encourages us to schedule more and more meetings just to schedule the meetings as opposed to use them very intentionally.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:06:15,840 ] That totally makes sense. And I mean, you coined the idea of meeting doomsday. What does that mean? And where do you see it the most?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:06:26,960 ] So a meeting doomsday is essentially a 48-hour calendar cleanse. So this is often deployed in teams. Ideally, it’s done across an entire organization. When I call it legacy meeting debt or meeting debt. You know, when meetings pile up on our calendars, we’re overwhelmed by just how many meetings we’re in. And moreover, how ineffective and inefficient they are for advancing our business goals, the meeting doomsday is a reset. So employees will delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then rebuild their calendar from scratch. So bring those meetings back that. Are valuable, have some value, but redesign them in a way that’s going to be most valuable. And then leave off the meetings that aren’t worth your time or the people in the room. What it does, it does a couple of things, but one of the key benefits is it gives employees the permission to take meetings off our calendar because often.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:07:29,630 ] We feel such a sense of guilt when we cancel a meeting. We take it personally. Others take it personally. When we put a meeting on our calendar, it’s a social contract that we’re establishing. When we think of the words, it’s a meeting invitation. We’re accepting. We’re rejecting. It’s not just yes or no. Because of that, we very much take it personally. And again, that’s a human bias where. Someone extends an invite, we feel an obligation to reciprocate in showing up for that meeting. The meeting doomsday helps to give you that built-in excuse that is very healthy in particular for employees that don’t feel a sense of psychological safety to push back on bad meetings.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:08:14,620 ] Yeah, that totally makes sense. But how would how would a company as a whole or a team know that they should be working on a meeting doomsday? What are those things that they could see? Is it just simply, ‘this is a lot of meetings’? Is it more of a burnout type feeling? What do you think are some key aspects that people could take into account to consider a meeting doomsday?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:08:43,150 ] Well, chances are you need one. And I recommend in every organization, at least once a year, because our work changes so much. And our work changes much more quickly than our calendar tends to change, in part because we feel this pressure to keep meetings on the calendar. But there are other telltale signs, you know, I often find if people are referring to and we just talked about work in quotation marks, you know, if people are describing the real work as happening outside of meetings. Oh, I can’t wait to get through my meetings to get back to work. That’s a sign that our meetings are not designed for the purpose of moving work forward in the way they should be. You know, double-booked meetings are another one. If your calendar looks the same as it did six months ago, that’s probably a sign. You could use a meeting doomsday, all of these legacy meetings that have piled up, which probably don’t reflect perfectly the current state of work and what we need to move work forward.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:09:43,160 ] Yeah, that makes sense. And something that you mentioned in your book is: there needs to be some sort of communicating before scheduling a meeting. What do you mean by that? Does that mean having an agenda in place so people know what the meeting’s for? Or what do you mean by communicating before?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:10:03,000 ] scheduling a meeting.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:10:03,930 ] Yeah, so one of the biggest problems we see with meetings is they’re used as a duct tape solution for all of our communication problems or opportunities.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:10:15,360 ] And one of the biggest opportunities we have in organizations and actually remote companies tend to do this quite well compared to in-person environments is. figure out what are the parts of the meeting that are essentially just information exchange, right? They’re the status updates, the boss briefings, you know, they don’t require synchronous, two-way communication.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:10:38,700 ] All of that should be moved outside of the meeting. And you know, often we think about meetings quite in a binary fashion, where we often say, ‘Oh, does this meeting deserve to exist, or does it not deserve to exist?’ When often a healthier question is, ‘What parts of this meeting deserve to exist, because they do require synchronous communication.’ I often use what I call the 4D test. It’s a two-part task.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:11:05,920 ] Yeah, I was just going to ask you about that. Those frameworks that you created, the 4D CEO test and the rules of halves. Let’s get into that.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:11:13,440 ] Okay, so the 4D test, it’s a two-part test, but the first test is 4Ds. A meeting should only exist if the purpose is to decide, debate, discuss, or develop yourself or your team.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:11:26,030 ] Okay.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:11:26,720 ] So status updates don’t pass that test. Boss briefings don’t pass that test. Even something like brainstorming— technically doesn’t pass that test.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:11:37,410 ] Overwhelmingly, the research suggests that brainstorming tends to happen more effectively when we do it independently first. Once we’ve brainstormed independently and we’re ready to discuss or debate the ideas, now we’ve passed into one of those four Ds and a meeting is often justified. But that extra step, not only gives your employees clarity in terms of what actually deserves to be a meeting, I think every organization should have something where employees have crystal clarity in terms of what deserves to be a meeting? When do I schedule a meeting in this organization? And then it also gives them something objective or perceivably objective to push back on. You know, I’m going to decline this meeting. I’m going to push back on this meeting because it does. doesn’t pass the test. Those types of tools can be extraordinarily helpful in giving employees more confidence to push back on bad meetings.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:12:35,590 ] Yeah, yeah. Do you believe that, as a manager or a leader?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:12:39,740 ] It’s a good thing to ask the team if we’re meeting too much, if we’re not meeting enough. Does that come into account in all this?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:12:49,530 ] Yes, in a sense of. Measurement around meetings is very important. And often we don’t. Any other workplace activity that consumes this much time and payroll expense, we would be measuring down to the decimal point. We don’t do that with meetings. I recommend, after about 10% of the meetings you run, to ask employees, was this worth the time you invested? This is a practice I learned from my colleague, Elise Keith. It’s called ROTI, return on time investment. And what that does is. It level sets in terms of asking employees, was this worth the time invested? And it minimizes some of the biases that we have around meetings. If you ask someone, you know, how effective are meetings in the organization or are we meeting? Too much chances are they’re going to say yes, you know, they hate meetings and we’re meeting too much. And this helps to get around some of those biases, and that everyone has a pretty good sense of whether their time was well invested.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:13:52,800 ] And I call it the meeting suck reflex. You try to minimize that as much as possible. It often isn’t highly effective to go into an organization and ask employees how effective your meetings are, because we have this natural negativity bias.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:14:09,850 ] Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, I’ve done that. I’ve asked team members, and I get both types of responses. Some say we’re meeting too much, and others say I’m out of the loop. I don’t know anything. You know, I’m not meeting enough. And so there’s this pull and push.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:14:26,320 ] From leaders, I believe where it’s like, okay. So where, where can we like set some middle ground? Something that we’re currently doing— within our company— is we’ve all decided that we should all have a.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:14:39,400 ] We currently have a Monday briefing meeting where we drink our coffee and we take a look at what the week ahead is, right? What are we doing? What client campaigns do we have? This and that. Um.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:14:54,450 ] And then something that I did is. I think I accidentally did a meeting doomsday without knowing it because when we passed from 2025 to 2026, I basically deleted all meetings. And I’m at a point where.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:15:10,720 ] I’m trying to really identify which ones before were necessary and not. Yes. Because me, myself, just me, myself, my mornings tend to be meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:15:22,970 ] Lunch?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:15:24,630 ] Then maybe two more. And then at the end of the day, I’m like.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:15:29,270 ] What work did I actually do? You know?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:15:32,900 ] And so I believe that could be the case sometimes when there’s so many meetings that people don’t actually have time to do their own things because every meeting is additional tasks. It’s like this snowball effect, I guess.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:15:48,960 ] Definitely. And we know I’ve done some research with my colleagues on something we call meeting hangovers, right? It’s not just the time we spend in the meeting. It’s the time after where we ruminating about the meeting, good or bad. This doesn’t just happen for bad meetings. If we’ve had a truly great meeting, you know, it should be taxing. We should. Have, you know, exercised our brain power and our empathy as humans often, and that should, you know, consume energy such that, you know, it’s. It’s also very dangerous to have back to back to back meetings because we’re not able to recover. And there’s fascinating research as well to show even if a meeting is four hours away, if it’s 9am and I have a 4pm meeting. Your brain knows that, right? And it starts this mental countdown where, regardless if you’re fully conscious of it, you’re preparing for that meeting. Sometimes you’re dreading it in a way that takes away from any sort of deep work that you might be trying to accomplish before the 4 p. m. meeting. So I think, you know, I love that you’re being so intentional about this because it’s it’s not just you know the single meeting— it’s looking at a system level in terms of what do I need to have on my calendar in terms of meetings to truly move work forward.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:17:06,810 ] Yeah, because in a lot of these meetings that we’ve deleted, we sometimes just came in and we were like, ‘Okay, so what are we talking about today? You know?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:17:16,669 ] Another reason for which some of these meetings weren’t working is because there was no clear agenda, which is something we’ve discussed. There needs to be some way of communicating what the meeting is for. Um, but as it relates to technology and AI right now, the AI boom that’s going on.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:17:38,800 ] What tools, if you can name any, or better yet—when should teams use tools like calendar links, AI summaries? What are your thoughts on? leveraging that technology.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:17:57,580 ] So in general, I’m so excited about the potential of AI to fix our meetings. In practice, I’m not seeing that. And I’m seeing much more— evidence and many more examples of AI driving more dysfunction in our meetings than making them more effective.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:18:17,290 ] At the root of that is so often we deploy technology and just deploy it. We don’t understand and take the time to clarify to our employees, moreover. What is the purpose of this technology? What is the aim? Is it benefiting the employees? Is it benefiting the team? Is it aimed at faster decision making? Is it aimed at more efficiency? All of these things are so important to clarify to employees. So scheduling is a great example where absolutely we should be using tools that can help. Ease some of the administrative drudgery associated with meetings. You know that’s a no-brainer. But when we get into territory around AI showing up as a participant in meetings or sending a note-taker to meetings, what often happens is you have individuals who are seeking to maximize their own productivity. And sometimes we see this with scheduling too, where you know, you deploy a scheduling bot that is, you know, designed to optimize for your individual schedule, doesn’t care about anyone else’s schedule, and it’s very easy to optimize your own productivity in a way that dumps friction on anyone else.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:19:32,370 ] And note-taker bots are the classic example of this. Where, you know, will be in meetings where half the participants are now note-taker bots. It’s highly distracting. You end up, you know, at the end of the meeting with three different versions of what actually happened in the meeting. And if we’re not intentional about the purpose, you know, if we were to be intentional, we would say. Okay, a note taker is probably a good idea for this meeting. We want to capture the notes and share them afterwards, but we only need one note taker in the meeting and align on that. And then you’re optimizing for the team and organization as opposed to individual productivity.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:20:12,730 ] Yeah, it makes total sense. And the tool we use is Zoom, and it creates a summary right afterwards. But I’m going to tell you something. I never actually look at those summaries. It’s just enough. email. It’s just more AI clutter, if I’m being honest.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:20:26,300 ] And that’s what we’re seeing. AI gives us an excuse to either not show up— to the meeting— or start to multitask in the meeting, because people start to say, ‘Oh, I can always look at the transcript after.’ But the reality is very few people do. And I think that’s, you know, as an organizer, that’s another thing to take into account. You know, even if you have technology deployed in meetings, assume people aren’t going to use it because we cling to the status quo. We cling to what we’ve been accustomed to in the past. And just because a technology exists, even if it’s powerful, often employees won’t either use it or use it as intended.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:21:08,070 ] Yeah, that makes total sense.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:21:11,580 ] What are your thoughts?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:21:14,060 ] We’re talking about how we should identify when meetings don’t make sense. How can companies or leaders create this environment in which employees can speak up and say, ‘This isn’t working. This meeting is taking too much of my time. I need more work for um, deep thinking. What type of environment and how can companies or leaders create that environment?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:21:42,960 ] So it’s such an important question. It’s such a hard question because it depends on the organization. And in particular, it depends on the psychological safety within the organization. In the best cases, and fortunately, I think this is more common than not. You know, you have an organization where there’s an acknowledgment that meetings are dysfunctional or could be improved, and a real hunger across all levels to fix it. Yep. The challenge is often, how do I do this? You know, how do I do this in a way that’s not just adding an agenda to a meeting and hoping to fix it? And so in those cases, is equipping employees with scripts in terms of arming them with ready-to-go scripts. How do I push back on a meeting that doesn’t feel like it’s worth my time explicitly? Sometimes it’s called the law of two feet, you know, explicitly building that into your meeting culture. It is the expectation that if you’re not contributing value to a meeting or you’re not reaping value, use your two feet— or however you’re able— and walk out of the room.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:22:48,390 ] You know, putting that on the meeting walls I’ve even seen. Leaders walking the talk and actually modeling these behaviors is very important. Having a way to collect insights from employees in terms of not just the return on time investment. But especially in environments that employees don’t feel safe pushing back on meetings, sometimes it’s called the bureaucracy mailbox. Amazon used that phrase. Having an anonymous channel where employees can submit examples of broken meetings can be effective in those environments where it feels less safe. And then, you know, at an individual level, the more you can use objective facts or objective tools like the 4D rule. The more confidence and conviction you have in pushing back on the meeting because there’s something concrete that’s ideally been endorsed by your organization to refer to as you’re pushing back.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:23:49,410 ] Yeah, that makes total sense. And I mean, It’s really fascinating that you’ve actually done research on this. Within the research that you’ve done, is there like a specific amount of time within in within a full-time week that um How do I phrase this question?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:24:10,220 ] Is there an optimal amount of time that should be dedicated to meetings per week? Have you seen that in your research? Like within an eight-hour full-time week? people should not be meeting for more than two hours. Is there any research behind that?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:24:26,650 ] So there actually is a little bit of research and in particular, a firm that I’ve worked with over the years called Worklytics. They help organizations understand how their employees are. What they found is, in general, on average, once you get above 10 hours per week in meetings, a whole host of negative consequences start to kick in. Now, that’s an average, obviously, depending on who you are in the organization, your level of seniority, your level of customer interaction, it’ll change. But what’s fascinating is if we go back to 1960, executives were spending less than 10 hours per week in meetings.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:25:08,860 ] 2007, that time had more than doubled to about 23 hours per week in meetings. And so, you know, over time, and there’s fascinating research that’s been done to show just how much more we collaborate now than we did, for example, at the turn of the century. Rob Cross has done great research. It’s increased by 50% or more. We’re spending so much time in these collaborative activities. In many ways, that makes sense. But for meetings, I think it’s very telling that the time has ballooned so much and yet the meetings are so dysfunctional. So I would encourage everyone to think about what is their meeting budget, per se. You know, and we have a good sense if we’re in 20 hours per week in meetings versus 10 hours, you know, we have a sense of how that impacts our other business priorities that are not taken care of in meetings. And I think it’s a very healthy reflection to go through week to week, day by day. And if you’re feeling— absolutely drained— and moreover, you’re not accomplishing your personal or team or organizational goals, you know, thinking about how meetings might be contributing to that and overwhelm, or, you know, sometimes it’s rarer, but sometimes too little meetings on the calendar can
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:26:24,580 ] also, you know, be detrimental.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:26:27,730 ] Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:26:30,890 ] And look, we’re nearing the end of our episode.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:26:33,840 ] I want to share something with you. Um.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:26:37,700 ] We as a company started working remotely since the pandemic, right? We all know it happened. And we said, okay, let’s try working remotely. And we did. And we stayed that way. We saw, first hand, that we were actually more productive working remotely. Aside from all the research and all the business benefits of not having a lease and an office and everything.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:26:58,380 ] Remote work worked for us. But.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:27:03,180 ] As a worker myself, I think one of the things that I miss the most about going to the office, if I had to name one, is those serendipitous moments or knowing that a colleague is 10 feet away and you can just quickly ask them something, these human touch points that would be meetings of themselves. Yes.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:27:30,470 ] So my question here is, How?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:27:35,850 ] Can that—sort of. Take place in a remote work setting, can it not? And I think the question here is: is it better to have weekly standing meetings to touch base with people, or no meetings, or less meetings and more impromptu meetings?
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:27:53,830 ] You know what I, you know?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:27:55,160 ] Yes, and there’s certainly no one-size-fits-all solution, but this is what we see in remote environments in particular is that loss of serendipitous connection.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:28:06,470 ] Often it’s not strictly work related. What we see is often it’s the discussion that is not work related. It’s related to hobbies or activities where. That is also very important in establishing trust in organizations, which is essential for producing our best work. It is having a sense of trust with other people. Sometimes it’s called multiplex relationships— the importance of establishing relationships beyond the word. And so, in great remote-first companies, they tend to do this well and do this intentionally from day one. It is how do they create spaces through virtual channels, or also, you know, occasional physical meetups, which are also very important. These are not just aimed at the work, but also developing these multifaceted relationships that we know are important for trust. What is fascinating about the research in terms of in-person checkpoints is that those in-person interactions tend to be highly, highly sticky.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:29:09,520 ] We often think, ‘Oh, we need to meet with someone once a week or once every month.’ You know, the research and multiple pieces of research suggest that those in-person interactions can last for months and months. And so I think that’s another important piece of this. Yes, in-person interactions matter, but they certainly don’t need to happen every day, every week, or even every month if we have other digital ways to connect and to connect in ways that aren’t strictly focused on the work.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:29:40,020 ] Yeah, that makes total sense.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:29:42,740 ] And look, my last question to you—Rebecca. This has been really insightful.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:29:50,850 ] How do you see meetings evolving? What is the utopia you have, if you will, as it relates to meetings and the way we work? future of meetings: what do you see happening in the next 10 to 20 years? Five, maybe. I mean, with AI, things are changing so fast. Maybe asking 10 years is too much. But within 5 to 10 years, what do you see— what do you what do you see will happen, or what would you wish to happen, as it relates to meetings and the future of work?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:30:21,350 ] Yes. So when it comes to AI, I think any predictions past six months, you know, don’t have a lot of weight. I think. What I expect to happen, and my utopia, unfortunately, I think is different right now. What I expect to happen. Um, if folks aren’t intentional, is more bad meetings, more dysfunctional meetings, because we’re using AI as a crutch for work that we should be doing as humans. That said, I do think there are going to be organizations that use AI very intentionally, both inside and outside of meetings. When they do so, they recognize that the power of AI is to amplify human intelligence and human potential. By virtue of that, meetings should only be used for the parts of work that are deeply, deeply human, because AI can help with everything else. AI can help with the information exchange, the discussions that don’t require the real-time interactions.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:31:24,410 ] The reason we want our meetings to be more efficient is to free up time for the parts of work that shouldn’t be highly efficient.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:31:34,730 ] creativity, brainstorming, building relationships, developing yourself for your team. These are all parts of work that are uniquely suited for synchronous interaction and something that we should. No. vigorously protect when it comes to how we deploy AI.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:31:51,410 ] Amazing. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us today. This was really insightful.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:31:56,670 ] Where can people get in touch with you for further information? Where is your book available? We’ll certainly link it within our episode. How can people get in touch with you and/ or your organization?
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:32:09,850 ] My book is everywhere. Your favorite bookstore, Amazon, et cetera. My website is rebeccahines. com and I’m on LinkedIn as well.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:32:18,560 ] Awesome. Thank you so much for your time today. I will be making a lot of actions after this episode, which to me was fascinating. So I really appreciate the time and the insights and the research you shared today.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:32:33,060 ] Thank you so much, Daniel. That was fun. I enjoyed it.
Daniel Lamadrid
[ 00:32:35,640 ] Thank you. See you.
Rebecca Hinds
[ 00:32:37,070 ] Bye.
