Through innovation and scale, artificial intelligence is rapidly changing workplaces and leisure time.
At the World Governments Summit in Dubai earlier this year, attendees heard how AI is redefining human capabilities by adding extra layers of thinking and learning. The International Monetary Fund reported in January that AI could affect about six in 10 jobs in advanced economies. Tech and AI companies are soaring in value as a result and show few signs of slowing down.
The IMF’s assessment may even already be an underestimation, such is the day-to-day creep of tools that allow you to find out if the cost of a product has risen in the past month and then quickly develop a report on what the long-term price trends might be or write a swift response to an urgent email. And those are the most superficial examples of how AI is reorganising and streamlining our days.
Indeed, almost every one of us would find it hard to go back to the version of work we used to do even 10 years ago, such are the efficiencies that have been and are being created. Change is all around us. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as LP Hartley once elegantly noted.
Except, perhaps, in the most stubbornly unchanging part of the working world – the meeting – which too often sits in the “plus ca change” folder. Why are workplace meetings so often resistant to overhaul and efficiency?
Rebecca Hinds’s recently published and sunnily titled book, Your Best Meeting Ever, tackles the issue head on by offering a series of principles to get better outcomes. The book has been described as a sound investment and a potential time-saver when reviewed.
Hinds, an organisational behaviour expert, begins and ends Your Best Meeting Ever with a fascinating nugget about the tactical playbook of the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
During the Second World War, Hinds writes, the department instructed US citizens in enemy territory “to use meetings to bog down productivity, drain morale and derail decision-making. Fast forward to today and meetings still feel like weapons of mass distraction and dysfunction. Only now, the sabotage isn’t deliberate”.
If that historical capsule and contemporary assessment sounds amusing, absurd or both, most of us can easily conjure an example of a meeting we walked away from feeling bemused or dissatisfied by.
In his decades-old comedic paperback Microwave Man, my former colleague Jonathan Gornall described in fine detail how he ended up in a workplace gaggle at an ex-employer that had “five of us in the room struggling with a problem, three more, I register, than it took to split the atom”. When we later worked together, we regularly used to trudge out of a long weekly gathering to convene another quick huddle afterwards to figure out what to do next.
Others, I suspect, will have experienced something similar, although as Hinds notes, the business of complaining about meetings has become something of a “workplace sport”. A Harris poll she cites finds that 8 per cent of people would rather have root canal treatment than attend a status meeting. Ouch.
The author does an excellent job in identifying how executives too easily lean into the performative aspect of gatherings and how employees boast about being double-booked in their calendars, falsely equating a full calendar of most-likely unproductive meetings with a sense that they are wildly productive.
Others can feel pressured to accept meeting invites that they don’t need to attend. A colleague at The National routinely likes to question whether a meeting could more easily have been an email, although inboxes can easily become as inefficient and jumbled as the most unstructured or poorly designed meeting.
Filling up chunks of time with meetings also means next to nothing unless they kickstart output. Unchecked, they can easily do the opposite and too easily become the smoke and mirrors that create the illusion of productivity, the author attests, even as participants like to think they project efficiency, competency and communication.
Data cited in the book suggests some employees spend almost six hours a week in entirely unproductive meetings and, all told, the equivalent of up to three days a week locked in conference rooms. The Covid-19 pandemic gave rise to a rush of additional meetings in workplaces, virtual gatherings replacing corridor chats as “corporate duct tape” slapped on every problem. Many of those meetings will have been critical at that historical juncture but effectiveness fades and degrades quickly.
Hinds suggests several fixes to get things back on track that include a calendar cleanse and reset, being ruthless about agendas, meeting lengths, frequency and attendees, managing egos within them and a commitment to consistently refining the product (also known as the meeting).
The prescription might be this: don’t let meetings persist as an “unavoidable workplace tax” that has to be paid. Nobody wants that, do they?
