Dr. Steven Rogelberg, an organisational psychologist from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, draws on his extensive research on workplace meetings to share how we might make acadmic meetings better. We discuss the inefficiencies of academic meetings, with Steven suggesting academics suffer from particularly ineffective meeting practices. He offers practical advice on improving meeting productivity, particularly for Faculty meetings, such as using targeted agendas and smaller group discussions, and stresses the value of bringing scientific rigour to meeting management. He also critiques the hybrid meeting format, advocating instead for fully virtual or in-person meetings. If you are looking for more insights about evidence-based meeting practices, I can highly recommend his books ‘The Surprising Science of Meetings’ and ‘Glad We Met: The Art and Science of One-to-One Meetings’ .
Overview:
00:29 Introduction: The Meeting Dilemma
01:42 Introducing Dr. Steven Rogelberg
03:56 The Academic Meeting Problem
09:23 Common Mistakes in Leading Meetings
11:06 Strategies for Effective Meetings
13:12 Having a Meeting About Meetings
14:34 The Importance of Feedback and Audits
15:55 The Faculty Meeting
18:15 Challenges of Large and Hybrid Meetings
19:21 More Inclusive Alternatives to Large Meetings
22:20 Hybrid Meetings and Virtual Meetings
23:54 Final Takeaways and Resources
25:46 Postscript
30:16 End
Related links:
Steven’s web page, LinkedIn page and online meeting resources
https://www.stevenrogelberg.com
Steven’s books:
Rogelberg, S. G. (2019). The surprising science of meetings: How you can lead your team to peak performance. Oxford University Press.
Rogelberg, S. G. (2024). Glad We Met: The Art and Science of 1: 1 Meetings. Oxford University Press.
And his academic publications, for example the two we mentioned:
Rogelberg, S., Kreamer, L. M., & Gray, J. (2025). Thirty Years of Meeting Science: Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 13.
Rogelberg, S. G., King, E. B., & Alonso, A. (2022). How we can bring IO psychology science and evidence-based practices to the public. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 15(2), 259-272.
Transcript
Welcome to Changing Academic Life. I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick, and this is a podcast series where academics and others share their stories, provide ideas, and provoke discussions about what we can do individually and collectively to change academic life for the better. Do you love going to your faculty meetings or departmental meetings, however you might call them where you are? If you're like many people, I'm guessing probably not. Meetings take up so much of our time as academics and researchers. Often they just don't feel like a very effective or valuable way of spending time. Meetings came up as a topic in our last episode where Deborah Boehm Davis talked about the many meetings she ran as both departmental chair and Dean. And she also shared how she realized that many of the meetings just weren't the most effective way to work with people, and so she started using a new strategy. Of sending out long agendas with all of the materials that people could pre-read before the meeting. And then when they came to the meeting, they'd identify together what were the most pressing issues, and then they'd focus their time in discussing those issues. And I thought it could be useful to build on this then, and to hear from a world leading expert about what the science says about meetings. And that expert is Dr. Steven Rogelberg, an organizational psychologist who holds the title of Chancellor's, professor at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, the Distinguished National, international and Interdisciplinary Contributions. And his research is all about how to make workplace meetings better. He has over 200 research publications on the topic and has numerous awards and honors, reflecting the quality and value of that research. The most recent one, being a Raymond Katzell Award for doing research that makes a difference for people in society. He's really committed to bringing organizational psychology science, and evidence-based practices to the public so that it can make a difference. In walking the talk, he's published two books that have been listed on more than two dozen best of lists. One book is the 2019 book called The Surprising Science of Meetings, how You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance. And then More Recently, in 2024, he published another book called Glad We Met the Art and Science of One-to-One Meetings. His webpage, stevenrogelberg.com is a treasure trove of useful resources, as well as collating numerous talks and interviews. He's been frequently interviewed in many major media, outlets internationally and has given numerous talks and keynotes. So I'm really honored that he's been able to speak with us here about what the science of meetings might have to say to us in academia. In particular, we focus on departmental meetings. So I hope you enjoy this conversation and can find something really practical to take away at the end. Steven, thank you so much for joining me, especially under the conditions where you're not feeling so great.
Steven:Well, I am thrilled to be here and a cold will not stop me for in having this conversation with you, so I really appreciate the invitation.
Geri:Thank you. And I mean one of the reasons for the invitation is your amazing research on meetings and you have some really staggering figures about the time and cost of meetings and despite that investment, how the majority of people say their meetings are unproductive and a waste of time. And I'm just thinking about academia because a lot of your research has been in organizations. Does academia have a similar meeting problem?
Steven:Yes. Absolutely bad meetings are an epidemic across all organizational types, but I think academics might be the worst. I really do. I think it might be the worst. Worst. And that's for a couple reasons.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:But one is we are horrible at providing training to leaders. The foundational skills that are essential to their leadership, right. Often we promote people, their research records, and so people don't have the skills. At the same time, while it's very well intentioned, our meetings and academics are so, so, so, so, so large. And we do it in the spirit of inclusion. But the research actually shows that as meeting size increases, not only does ineffectiveness increase with it, but people's feelings of inclusion decreases. So we think we're being inclusive, but it's actually the opposite. People experience it as performative. Yes. So when you think about a lack of skills. And you think about too large of a meeting. And also in academics, we tend to meet out of habit. We have a lot of meeting rituals that we don't ever just stop and go, wait, why are we doing this? So those are some unique forces Yeah. That we haven't,
Geri:Yeah. That's depressingly reassuring to know, because that totally reflects my own experience of just too many meetings. And yeah, the performativity of it and the lack of skills and training I've never been trained on. I know. Well, meetings or any leadership skills really. I think there's a little bit of a shift.
Steven:Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. It really is fascinating when you think about an organizational type that promotes people to leadership positions, but really for all intents and purposes, does not prepare them for it.
Geri:Yeah. Yep. It does not prepare them. And what do we do? I mean, we end up just perpetuating what's been done. Exactly.
Steven:Yeah. We just keep recycling the same dysfunctional practices. So yeah, it's a big problem, but, um, there are some academic institutions that actually wanna do something about it.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:For example, I was just at University of Tennessee and helping their senior leadership, um, been at University of New Mexico and other universities. So I do think that thoughtful deans and Provost realize that this is a good thing to do.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:That bad meetings really disengage their people and cost tremendous time that could be used in so many better ways.
Geri:Yeah. Which is interesting as well, given that we're supposed to be scientists, but we don't consider evidence-based practices for around things like meetings and leadership practices more generally.
Steven:That is so true.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:It's a blind spot that we have.
Geri:Yeah. Yeah. And is that, I wonder if it's hubris as well, because we're academics, you know, we know how to do things.
Steven:Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of things that humans assume they're good at, that they're not.
Geri:Mm.
Steven:Let's go for a basic one. Let's go to marriage and picking a partner. Clearly with 50% divorce rates we're not that good at it.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:And yet, if you ask people, they will say, oh no, I could definitely pick a partner. There's been research done on people in prisons and they ask these individuals who evaluate their ethicality and integrity, and compared to the general population. They rated themselves as being more ethical and higher integrity than the population. So we generally think that we are better than we are. Yeah. Yeah. And this blind spot not only leads us to reifying the bad practices we've experienced, but also prevents us from learning. Mm-hmm. Right. We generally assume that the problem is everyone else, not us. Right. I am, I'm the academic that absolutely can run good meetings.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:But you're probably not. And it takes work. I mean, I had to work really hard on my own meetings like it, when I first started as a leader, I thought I was good, but I was actually making mistakes and I had to really work on it. And I had to collect feedback from people and suggestions and it helped.
Geri:So what, what were some of the key mistakes that you made, do you think, when you first started
Steven:I privileged harmony in my meetings.
Geri:Uhhuh.
Steven:So I didn't really want people to be fighting. I privileged harmony, and that's a mistake. We want disagreement. We just want it to be resolved constructively.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:So the phrase that I really like is this idea of positive turbulence. So a good meeting leader creates positive turbulence. Creates a safe space for people to resolve it.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:So initially, because I privileged harmony, I wasn't creating the conditions for disagreement. And then I embraced it. I said, okay, no, we need disagreement. We have hard things to talk about, so let's disagree, but let's do it in a really healthy, informative way that attacks ideas, not people.
Geri:Mm. And you talked about not learning some of the leadership skills. I imagine that in the process of making that change, you might have needed to have called some people out sometimes where it did start to become more personal attack. How might you practically engage in that sort of conversation? Or what would you actually say
Steven:At the start of the meeting, if the leader of the meeting says to the attendees, we have some really important topics to discuss. I know that not everyone's gonna see it the exact same way. We need you to disagree with each other, but let's talk about keeping it on the idea not the person.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:So basically, I'm trying to normalize a particular behavior, but the fact is. Until I talk about it, people don't know it.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:So often meeting leaders don't set expectations upfront. Yeah. Right. They don't say, Hey, you know what, everyone, let's keep our contributions to no more than 30 seconds so we can create space for others. Let's be sure to listen to each other before we formulate our counter argument. So put it out there.
Geri:Mm-hmm. And these are really important people skills and I like really like the idea of the setting expectations. Because that also gives permission then to say, we said 30 seconds, can we just give someone else space? It gives you the opportunity, the permission to intervene then.
Steven:Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, you know, basically, this will sound funny, but we actually need to talk more about meetings, and every once in a while we actually need to have a meeting about meetings.
Geri:Yes.
Steven:Because how could we not? Yeah, like if you think about it, you have all this discontent, all this frustration, all this misery. Why don't we talk about it constructively? We're trained to solve problems. Is this the one problem we can't solve? Of course not. So we need to, every once in a while, if you're a department chair, you need to look at your department meetings and say, is this really working for folks? How can I make it better? And every once in a while we need to do a meeting audit with our people to try to identify meetings that aren't needed.
Geri:Yep.
Steven:So while I absolutely get the silliness of the notion of a meeting about meetings, but we have to have a meeting about meetings.
Geri:No, but it's in line with that thing of setting up the expectations for the beginning. You often talk about being intentional in your meetings. Exactly. It's being intentional about your meetings, not just in your meetings. It's what makes sense. Yeah. And you
Steven:can really position yourself as a hero, right. So mm-hmm. If I'm meeting with my department and I say, listen, you all are stretched so far and you attend a lot of meetings that are frustrating. I don't want to be part of that problem. I want to be a positive force in your world.
Geri:Yeah. Yeah.
Steven:So let's look at our meetings to make them better. So you really are positioning yourself. Yeah. As a hero. And you know, faculty will be like, oh, that's great. Thank you.
Geri:And as you articulate so eloquently in one of the books, in doing that as well, it builds trust and probably increases the likelihood of engagement in meetings when you do have meetings because people know that it's a meeting that you've thought about and that you are going to run in a good way. That you think that there's value in them giving their time to this meeting.
Steven:You are completely right.
Geri:What would be your advice to a department chair then? So there's the have a meeting about meetings, having done an audit and gathering feedback. You talked about that as well.
Steven:So I would, I would just start with the feedback.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:I would ask people, I would just do a very quick little survey.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:Asking people. To evaluate like department meetings, what's going well, not so well, and ideas for improvement.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:I would also ask them what meetings are they regularly attending that perhaps aren't needed that could be improved, and what are their ideas?
Geri:Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Steven:So basically the, you know, meetings are shared experiences. So therefore we want to engage the collective in solving it.
Geri:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Steven:And the good news is by doing that. You're basically changing the norms in that department. So when, let's say program directors have meetings right now, they're on notice.
Geri:Yes. Yes.
Steven:So you can start cascading healthy and effective process.
Geri:Yes. Yes. That's the, that's part of the whole setting the culture. And you've just had a paper that you've published just in July that was reviewing 30 years of research on meetings. Yeah. And that reflects some of the recommendations you have for the organizational level about the audit and doing all of this sort of work.
Steven:Yes.
Geri:So in, in the work that you've done with other universities, has it often been talking about the faculty level type meeting, the department level meeting and all?
Steven:All the above. Yeah.
Geri:All. Okay.
Steven:Yeah. You know, it's very interesting when you think about organizational expenses.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:And we often think IT is probably our most expensive thing that we do as an entity. But in most organizations, meetings are actually the most expensive thing by far.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:You know, the time by salaries, not to mention opportunity costs.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:And it, we manage that budget. We make sure it's working for us.
Geri:Mm.
Steven:But when it comes to meetings, we don't,
Geri:Nope.
Steven:So this is an opportunity for universities, right, to say, you know what? Let's stop wasting our people's time and causing frustration.
Geri:And it's probably, I'm just thinking about the research that's showing that academics have a higher rate of burnout and stress than the general population. And all of the research is showing that that's increasing as well. And that for all sorts of reasons with the managerial culture and performance measures and so on. Yeah. But you know, like instead of giving a yoga program or a mindfulness program for people to attend, this would be far more effective. In respecting people's time. It's a way of showing that respect for people's time and helping them navigate.
Steven:I really like that. Yeah, I like that. A lots and trade-offs. You know, we, we tell our colleagues, you need to do more with less. They're going to shoot, they're going to be pretty angry.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:But if we say, yeah, here are some things that we have to work on. Yeah. But let's make some cuts elsewhere. Right? By removing some wasted meetings. So. Just piling on people is not where people are at right now, especially in universities in the us.
Geri:Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Steven:And so yeah, we need to hear messages of support, less wasted work. Those are really critical. It's, it's critical for all universities. It's just that we have some unique challenges right now.
Geri:You do have some unique challenges. I'm just trying to think about the tension between the performativity of large faculty meetings and the amount of time that's wasted if you've got your 50, 60, whatever, a hundred faculty that're supposed to be sitting in a room or hybrid as we're increasingly doing now at our place. And, the notion of inclusion. And some of the research that talks about academics wanting to have a voice. And they like having a voice as we know. That thing then about how do you navigate that tension of making everyone feel like they can have a say or hear about what's going on, but use their time well. What would be some of the top tricks that a departmental chair or meeting facilitator could do with a large meeting?
Steven:The large meetings are obviously very hard and tricky. And typically in academics people are posturing. And there's not really engagement on ideas. Basically everyone's just positioning their comment that they want to make. So I think we have to think differently about the process.
Geri:Mm-hmm.
Steven:We need to do more, um, maybe sequential, smaller group meetings, right? So if a chair wants to, let's say, settle on this curriculum issue, what they could do is invite everyone to have input via a survey or some document, right? So now everyone's voice. Then there's a committee of, let's say, of six people who, you know, kind of collect that, put it all together. And then, you know, perhaps they can engage in a process for narrowing down the types of op options by having voting. But that's another way of including all voices, and you can keep sharing the findings for each one of these, you know, then you could potentially create, another small group that refines the ideas and then it's sent back out to people who then approve the refining. So basically what we're doing is, we're not adding more time to people's schedule, we're just making the time more productive by breaking it up and spreading it out. But the process I just shared, which is just off the cuff by the way, it's real. Right? It's inclusive. It actually uses people's voices. Yeah. And accommodates what they learn. It's an iterative process. So basically this thought of putting 25, 30 people in a room and saying, yeah, let's come up with a group decision. That's rubbish. Not possible. But we can do these other types of approaches, right? Soliciting input, small groups, going back out, having people vote, rank order, small group refining like that is a way of truly engaging with people.
Geri:And it sounds like it would encourage much more thoughtful contributions and input and be more inclusive for people. So I don't know about your, department or faculty, but we have many of us have very multicultural areas and people with different languages, uh, can often find it difficult to express themselves. Especially where you have a lot of the very active people who like to talk a lot. Yeah. And so this provides. Both the opportunity for more thoughtful input as well as getting more voices.
Steven:Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. You know, when we ask people to respond to some worry via email or form Right. That's starting to privilege people who write better than they speak.
Geri:Mm. Yeah.
Steven:And we definitely have those people in the cast. Yes.
Geri:Yep.
Steven:So, you know, let's make sure that we design an eclectic experience so that everyone is privileged. And disadvantaged at various times. Mm. The bottom line though is that no one should think that they can truly generate consensus once a meeting goes beyond 20 people. It's just not, it's not real. It's.
Geri:No, it's a tick in the box, isn't it? That says, I've consulted everyone. Exactly. Does your research say anything about hybrid and, yes. Yeah.
Steven:Yes. So sadly, hybrid are the worst. Those people who are attending remote or just unplugged their multitasking. They don't feel included.
Geri:I have to just put my hand up to that.
Steven:Um, so yeah, they're just there, but not there at all. The best practice is not a hybrid meeting, but either a fully virtual meeting Yeah. Or for a fully in person meeting.
Geri:Yeah. Yeah.
Steven:And I think it's important to recognize virtual meetings actually have more promise than even face-to-face meetings.
Geri:Oh, okay.
Steven:Right. So virtual meetings create a more democratic setup. Everyone's pictures on equal playing, there's no head of table effects. Oh. The use of the chat function allows for more voices to emerge. People who are more comfortable writing can have their voice, greater integration of voting. There's a lot of inherent positives associated with virtual meetings. I'm not saying you shouldn't have face-to-face
Geri:No.
Steven:But I'm saying virtual meetings.
Geri:Yeah.
Steven:Stock up.
Geri:And that's part of the intentionality then, isn't it? About what, um, medium is going to be best for the sort of topics we want to have. Because you can also do the breakout groups in so you can get lots of small discussions as well.
Steven:Excellent.
Geri:Just in wrapping up, is there's some final takeaway that you would wanna leave us with about, you know, if there's one thing that people could do better, what would it be? Us people in Yes. Academia for our colleagues.
Steven:Yes. So, you know, my books have a lot of ideas. Right. And
Geri:Lots.
Steven:I'll share one of the ones that I think is particularly good for academics. So when we look at agendas, most agendas are structured as a set of topics to be discussed. What I wannt o encourage leaders to do is to frame their agendas as a set of questions to be answered. By framing your agenda as questions, now you have to really stop and think, why are we having this meeting? It's to answer these questions. By framing your agenda as questions, you have a much better idea of who needs to be there. They're relevant to the questions By framing your agenda as questions, you actually know if the meeting has been successful or not. The questions have been answered. And by framing your agenda as questions, it creates an engaging challenge that draws them in just like we see with our students. Hmm. And finally, if you can't think of any questions, it likely means you don't need, you don't
Geri:need a meeting
Steven:and that might be a great way of wrapping up our call.
Geri:That sounds great. Because I did read something that said people's favorite meetings were the meetings that got canceled.
Steven:Yeah. That's sad but true.
Geri:Yeah. So Steven, thank you so much for your time and for your generosity and all the resources that you share. I'll point people to those resources and to your books 'cause you have lots of tools, templates, checklists. Yep. Yep. So thank you very much.
Steven:My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you so much.
Geri:What a great call to action to stop and reflect on what meetings we have if we need to have them, and how to make them better. So in terms of being more intentional about meetings, we can take Steven's last questions and reframe them as: why are we having this meeting? Who needs to be there? How will they engage? And how will I know if the meeting has been successful? And he talked about the value of framing an agenda as questions because they can be the anchor points for how you answer those questions around your intentional meeting. We never got to discuss it, but I can also share what Steven's book would say about Deborah's strategy of sending out the reading beforehand. His evidence-based practice recommendations is about providing an agenda ahead of time that includes additional information such as the goals for the meeting and the purpose of each person's attendance there. And he does say about providing materials, preparatory materials in advance of the meeting, like sending any necessary reading or introduction materials. But his proposal is to limit the amount of materials where possible. And he also makes mention in his book on some of the practices at Amazon, for example, about time for silent reading. So if people, or on the assumption that people don't have time to read beforehand, providing explicit time at the beginning of the meeting for that silent reading. So I'm really grateful to Steven for all that he shared here. I also just want to say that Steven seems like an amazing human being, that he still did this call with me despite being under the weather and was so present. I also want to just recognize him for how amazingly responsive and respectful he's been in all his communications with me in setting up this call. And I also think he's a bit of a role model in how to translate our research so that it can be more accessible to the public as he's done with his meetings research. And for that reason, I'm really happy to strongly recommend his book, the Surprising Science of Meetings. It's a really practical book, and what we talked about here is just a tiny flavor of what he offers there. The book also includes lots of tools and checklists to support putting the ideas into action. I'll put the relevant links on the episode webpage, for example, to his research papers, including the journal paper on bringing science to the public and his recent journal paper, 30 years of meeting science lessons learned and the road ahead. I'll also provide a PDF template that you can download that I constructed based on having read his book. So it may be useful for you if you do want to conduct your own meeting audit. And I'd leave you with a final question then to think about how might you be more intentional about the meetings you run if you are a leader. Or a meeting facilitator. And what can you do if you are a meeting participant to contribute to making your meetings better as well? You can find the summary notes, a transcript and related links for this podcast on www.changingacademiclife.com. You can also subscribe to Changing Academic Life on iTunes, Spotify. And I'm really hoping that we can widen the conversation about how we can do academia differently. And you can contribute to this by rating the podcast and also giving feedback. And if something connected with you, please consider sharing this podcast with your colleagues. Together we can make change happen.