How to Make Meetings Matter

They're a crucial part of the business process, but if your meetings are planned on autopilot, you're probably not sending the right message

by Jessie Scanlon

Perry Klebahn has run a lot of companywide meetings since he took over as CEO of ailing bag company Timbuk2 in January, 2007. It's been a period of change, of difficult decisions, of executive departures, and he wanted to keep the 70 employees of the San Francisco company informed and engaged. But what he'd hoped would be an open forum for discussion turned into an awkward weekly event.

"People braced themselves for the meetings because they'd become a time to broadcast the latest changes," says Klebahn, who admits planning for the company meetings wasn't on his list of top priorities.

That's typical: For most business leaders, planning for a meeting amounts to making a list of agenda items or talking points. But the all-company meeting—or any meeting, for that matter—deserves more attention, even if you're not leading a company through a turnaround. That's because meetings play a powerful role in corporate life. They are both a reflection of an organization's culture and a means of reinforcing that culture. So in big and small and sometimes trivial ways, meetings send employees a message about the company, and if meetings are planned on autopilot, you're probably not sending the right message.

Meeting Design

Klebahn was lucky —as a graduate of Stanford's product design program and a part-time professor there since 1996 (he's taught product design and several classes in the D-School, including a design-thinking "boot camp"), he's friends with two professors who were teaching a D-School course about applying design principles to business processes or systems. The idea was to treat an organization as a prototype to be refined and improved. In one project, for instance, students had worked with an airline to uncover and propose improvements to the passenger travel experience.

The professors—Robert Sutton, an expert in organizational behavior and author of, most recently, The No Asshole Rule, and Debra Dunn, a 22-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) who held leadership positions in the marketing, manufacturing, and human resources divisions before moving to corporate HQ, where she helped drive initiatives such as the Agilent spin-off—approached Klebahn about a short, Timbuk2-based project for the class and homed in on the meeting as the right-sized problem. It was, says Dunn, "small enough for students to wrap their arms around and large enough that it would make a significant impact. Meetings have tremendous symbolic power."

"I was focused on saving the company," says Klebahn. "We had four warehouses and needed to shut down three of them. There were ergonomic safety issues in the office, and you don't talk about safety issues—you fix them. I just didn't think that much about the culture until Bob [Sutton] said to me: 'If you destroy the culture, then you destroy the company.'"

Room for Improvement

So on Feb. 6, 2008, Sutton, Dunn, and 14 students took a bus up to San Francisco to observe a company meeting. As Sutton recalls, most people in the meeting were standing or sitting on the floor. "The sun was glaring through the windows, forcing many to shield their eyes. You couldn't tell who was in charge. Some people were called on to give status reports didn't have anything to report," he says. "There was no mention of Timbuk2's product or its customers. There was no food. One person fell asleep."