Shani Harmon: Barriers, Signaling, Untapped Productivity | Work 20XX #05

Jeff Frick
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here coming to you from the home office for another episode of Work 20XX on the future of work, but as we like to say here, it's not about the future of work, it's work and it's happening now. We're really excited to have this next guest. We've been talking about meetings and meetings are not necessarily a great thing to get most work done because most people who haven't had the training, they don't know what their best practices are. So rather than tell you don't do it anymore, I thought, " thought, "Why don't we go get somebody who can tell us what we should be doing?" Really excited to be welcoming in through the magic of WebEx and the internet all the way from Chicago, Illinois. She's Shani Harmon. She is the co-founder and CEO of Stop Meeting Like This. So Shani great to see you. 

Shani Harmon
Nice to be here, Jeff. Thanks for the invitation. 

Jeff Frick
Oh, absolutely. So first off, I just noticed on LinkedIn, Happy birthday. Stop Meeting Like This turns nine next month in June. So happy birthday to the company. That's great.

Shani Harmon
Thank you very much. We're very proud of that. 

Jeff Frick
Well, I'm sure. I'm really curious with that kind of historical context. Wow, what a different world it was when you kind of started on this mission to where we ended up a couple years ago to where we are now. I wonder if you can kind of reflect with a little bit of historical perspective how perspective how the landscape has changed or maybe the reception to your message. 

Shani Harmon
Absolutely. Well, and we've got into this particular specialty because we noticed that clients would say to us, as organizational development consultants, that we used their time very well and that the meetings that we ran were efficient and effective and kind of fun. We got things done and it was terrible when we weren't part of the process. We wondered why everyone would accept that as the sort of level of engagement in their day to day work experience. What we started to find is that across the board, people have very low standards for how their time is used in meetings. So our first kind of campaign was just let's reset that, let's expect more out of how our time is used in organizations, and can't we sort of focus on that. What would happen is that people would say, "Can you train us to have better meetings?" We would say, "We can and it probably won't work." The reason it won't work is because you know you should have an agenda, you should start on time, you should send a recap, maybe keep the number of participants fairly small, but no one does it. The most accessible analogy is it's like nutrition.

At this point, the food pyramid is correct. We know exactly and we have devices telling us all the time what we should be doing to keep ourselves in optimal health. Most people don't do it. So trying to change the mindset about how we use our time, how we use our energy and to believe that meetings could be something that we look forward to instead of something that we dread, that kills our energy and day, that was our first mission. But then what happened is obviously the world changed overnight. We used to campaign to get people to turn their camera on in meetings where someone was remote and they're, "Absolutely not. No, it's too hard. I don't want to look at a camera." Then obviously the pandemic changed all of that overnight and it introduced some new opportunities, but a lot of new challenges as well. Now, we're at the worst possible moment. This transition back into the offices where some people will be remote permanently, some people will spend their time in the office sometimes, at home sometimes, puts us in a hybrid environment which has many, many pitfalls of its own. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. So there's so much to unpack and we're going to get to a lot of it and I'm excited. But let's start out really with just the basics. I mean, the word that I have captured the most from this COVID thing is intentionality. It really kind of shined a light on this assumption before that we just assume things were the way they were. We assume when people are in an office, they're going to interact and engage. We assume that people be meeting best practices and are going to make a really useful return on that investment of time when you count up all the people in the room and how much they make per hour. It's crazy. So I think this intentionality is so important. So let's talk about just for the basics before we get into why they don't do it or not, let's at least give them the instructions. So when should you not have a meeting that traditionally people do have meeting? What are the types of activities that hello, this is not a good fit? 

Shani Harmon
The number one is an inform. So telling people information in a group setting. Our audio attention span, not very long. Many of us prefer to consume information independently, particularly if you're a fast reader, I could have completely absorbed that in 15 minutes, but I had to sit for 60 minutes and listen to you march me through it, right? It's partially because we don't trust information exchange that we don't have hands on. So that's why there are so many update and inform meetings. Likewise, the kind of weekly team meeting, what it often becomes is a series of one on ones with a very large audience, because I only listen when I'm talking, I don't listen when anyone else is talking. So I miss all those opportunities to integrate and connect the dots or see we are duplicating effort, we should work together on this. So those are two of the very most common reasons not to meet. 

Jeff Frick
Right. Which it's interesting, right? Because that's probably a legacy of a time before there was email. I was reading or listening to a podcast about the role of middle managers and they used to have a pretty clear role in the communication conduit from the top to the bottom. But now they've been surpassed, right? Because now the top likes to communicate directly to the bottom through things like all hands or weekly updates or whatever, not so much a meeting, but more of a kind of an informal or a communication. Then there's all these other channels of communication that have kind of got around them, and yet people still hold onto that legacy status update meeting because it's always been there. Well, what should they do instead? How should they think about that communication channel and do it a better way? better way? 

Shani Harmon
We're big advocates for asynchronous platforms and there's a bevy to choose from, but it's a place where you have a shared dashboard that says, Okay, here's where we were. Here's where we are now. Challenges we encountered, help we might need," and have a practice of updating it on a regular basis. If the transition from the staff meeting to working entirely asynchronously is too hard, and it is often too hard, then kind of do it together. So let's spend the first 15 minutes of this meeting working independently to update our portion of the status and then let's just highlight things that need to be discussed or I want to call your attention to, as opposed to the it's my turn, I must give my reports, whether it actually has any action items or implications for anyone else. Again, there's a million platforms that people can also use to task manage and sort of see work in progress and what the status is. So using those so that it neither clutters your inbox nor requires a meeting is the ideal situation in the times we're in. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. It's funny, I had Darren Murph on from GitLab, the very first one of these things and his line from that interview was, "A human resources officer asked me how to have better meetings," and he said, "Make them harder to have." It really goes to your point. If you actually do all the things on your list, have an agenda, everybody has a clear role, meet everybody by name, have clear action items, have clear follow up. I mean, you basically lay out the roadmap. This is not a mystery. If you do those things, the chances of a successful meeting are pretty high in terms of a measurable output. But people just don't have the time. Ah, it's just so frustrating. I mean, you mean, you must go bananas when you basically give them the roadmap and yet you know people are context switching right up to the last moment, you know they're not doing the preparation. What do you think about when you hear somebody like Amazon, they carve out formal time at the beginning of the meeting to give them time to prep so that everybody is on equal footing when they start the conversation? Interesting tact. 

Shani Harmon
I think that's a genius solution and we have co-opted it and make it part of the advice that we give. But really, it's because the entire collaborative system is out of sync. So what should happen for effective collaboration these days is that you have good balance between working alone, working in turns and working together and working together as meetings. But we have a very strong default in that direction. Obviously, it's only gotten worse during the pandemic. I mean, the number of meetings per day has gone up tremendously because it's our only mechanism for connecting with others. But white space, that kind of working alone, is so critical because when do I have time to do a light design for a meeting or create a succinct pre-read, is that's the only way people will actually read it, or think about what questions am I really trying to get answered versus, oh, I need to do a project, let's just get a bunch of people in a room and we'll kick it off, which is sloppy collaboration, but we get away with it all the time, or asynchronous collaboration is when we work in turns but we have really good handoffs. 

So Jeff, I have created the first draft. Here's the three questions I have. Can you take a look at them and get back to me by the end of the day tomorrow? That's a clear handoff and request. If you get a good balance of those things, then you're able to do the pieces of independent work that make the whole system work. But we starve ourselves of working time. We don't schedule it on their calendars. We don't respect it when we do. So we squeeze that stuff into the early morning, at night after the kids have gone to bed and it's our last priority. But if you ask yourself, "How do I create value in my organization? What am I really here to do?" I will guarantee that your value creating activity is not answer emails. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. 

Shani Harmon
No one's hired to do that.

Jeff Frick
That's funny, right? You have to get up early or stay up late to do your work, because you're distracted all day

Shani Harmon
Is it any wonder why everyone's burned out.

Jeff Frick
We'll steal from Amazon again because I know them well and the parallels are interesting, right? They call it the one pizza or two pizza meeting. If you can't feed everybody in two pizzas, you have too many people in the room. I can't remember how you say it, a very similar thing, right? Which is it's easier to do some of these behaviors and activities if you're doing it within a scale that's manageable. Of course you can't get feedback from everyone if you have 77 people in the meeting. I mean, again, simple concepts, tough to execute day to day, but really you're giving them the roadmap of how to do this effectively. 

Shani Harmon
Right. But there are so many dynamics that are holding these old habits in place. So for the meetings are too large issue, it's fear of missing out. We always say, "Let's say, "Let's try to shift to joy of missing out." So go from FOMO to JOMO. Because wouldn't it be better to have some time to actually do your work? But people say, "Oh, it's a good learning opportunity." Or they're going to need to know the output of this conversation so they should be there. That is just an indicator that you don't have reliable mechanisms for communicating the key discussion points, the decisions and the next steps from meetings. So it's a true need. I need the information about what happened in this meeting and I don't believe that there's another way for me to get it. It also signals importance. I mean, there are cultures where if you're invited to the meeting, it means you're somebody. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right.

Shani Harmon
So then everybody clamors to get invited to the meeting because it's a sign of their significance, never mind we've just made the meeting terrible because it's just. We do the simple math of how long is the meeting divided by the number of people who are invited and that's the amount of air time available to everybody. So you're like, If I only have three and a half minutes of air time possible, and by the way, the leader's going to speak for the bulk of the time anyway, What contribution am I making by attending this meeting?

Jeff Frick
Right. You're bringing up this really interesting kind of interplay between trust and communication and then kind of channels of communication. Going to save this for a little bit later, but you keep coming back to it. These are all really communication issues, huge communication issues. One, I don't trust that we have the systems in place that if I don't show up at the meeting, I'm not going to get the information legitimately, besides the political stuff, right? That's a legitimate concern for a lot of people because a lot of companies don't, as you said, have the documentation and the reporting to make sure that it was clear what the meeting was about and it was clear what the outcome was. So if I don't go, I can't feel confident that I can check in. But as our communication channels have exploded, and you talk a lot about email and managing email and using email as a way to kind of manage your calendar, and then having a second side channel, like a DM or an IM. I wonder if you can speak to this proliferation of communication channels, but without the intentionality to manage them. What happens? You get a text, you get an email, you get a IM and you get a phone call from the boss all on the same issue at the same time with really no kind of systematic way to know whether this is something I need to react to right away or something that I can wait and finish my focused work.

Shani Harmon
Yeah. There's nothing better than getting a text two minutes after you got an email saying, "Did you see my email?" Right? Which suggests it's a terrible manager signal because it actually suggests that I expect you to be monitoring email at all times, which is just an incredible way to distract yourself all day, right? So we would advocate if you're doing focused work, you've got to walk away from email. We think organizations need a better roadmap for what technology for what purpose. So what is an IM or DM really for? What rises to the level of a text? So many organizations, and especially fast growing, I understand the kind of dynamic rhythm of them, but they use text as such a common communication channel, but it's actually activating the stress response because it's sort of like, 'It's an emergency, it's an emergency.' I counsel leaders a lot like, " like, "You're actually not firefighters or paramedics, but you are creating this emergency mindset where people are terrified to leave to leave their devices behind." So we talk about the erosion of the work-life boundary, and obviously technology is at the heart of all of that, but it's also the practices that organizations adopt.

So it's like picking the medium that meets the moment is critical. So emails should be for things that they have sort of the medium shelf life. I want to be able to go back to it, but a lot of companies have sort of a 30 day purge process. So you need to know how long you need it. Versus infrastructure like a SharePoint or a BaseCamp or some technology that's your document storage where you put things that are durable and that you want people to be able to access over time. Whereas the IM is kind of the just in time. I really strongly urge the text is really, if it's urgent, that's the last resort. Now, that's my personal preference. It actually doesn't matter what the answers are, it's that we all have a shared understanding of the answers. 

Jeff Frick
I think there's another guide there actually. You don't have a guide on that one? I think that's your next guide. I mean, literally, and getting back to Darren of GitLab, they're super specific as to you communicate this type of activity on this type of channel and certain things, as you say, they flush because they don't want permanent stuff on that channel so they kind of manage it with rules versus trying to manage it with telling people stuff. So it's such a hard thing. The other thing is you talk about burnout. Well, there's nothing like burnout like being on a high stress waiting for the fire alarm to go off all day. I mean, even the fire guys get a break in between waiting for the alarms to go off. So it's not sustainable to manage that kind of communication flow. So do you have a preferred kind of hierarchy? You said text is the highest kind of emergency is the way you guys treat it. 

Shani Harmon
That's how we treat it. So for example, when we're out of office, we put an out of office and it typically says, "Here's who you can contact. In the event of a real emergency, you can text me." But we've sort of set a standard of what is a real emergency, right? It's something that it's a client facing issue that we simply do not know how to solve without your engagement, or whatever that might be. Again, it's kind of publishing those rules. People like Darren who take it really seriously, I mean, it's part of their business model, so you can see why he would care about that so much.

Jeff Frick
Right, right.

Shani Harmon
But they're at this most senior leadership levels, there are people who care how we collaborate because they recognize that knowledge worker efficiency is incredibly important to the bottom line of organizations, right? They're in a war for talent. They think they need to hire a hundred people. But what if you could just make the hundreds of people that you already have 25% more efficient, 10% more efficient, and their work hours stay the same or go down. There's an incredible untapped source of productivity, efficiency and engagement that we're just letting it languish because we don't know how to activate it. 

Jeff Frick
So many things I want to go there. You used efficiency and productivity in the same sentence. I think what I've been discovering this whole thing is nobody wants to be efficient and nobody actually should be efficient. You should focus on productivity. So it's a different measure. So say in a facility's point of view, you don't measure efficiency in terms of how many bodies per square foot, but if you can start measuring productivity of those bodies, it's a completely different way to think about the space and how you invest in the types of activities and supporting materials and technologies to make those people be more productive. Because nobody can afford to be a cost center anymore. Nobody can afford to be a cost center. To your point, worrying about efficiency of desks and furniture versus the productivity of those people that sit in there. Ryan Anderson from MillerKnoll, it's funny that we designed the whole thing to run the pipes for the computers and we just stuck the people where the chairs happen to go. I mean what a crazy way to think about things. 

Shani Harmon
I would just say Jeff, I was using efficiency in a slightly different way, which is the idea that the way that we work has an efficiency bias in it. So we don't start from scratch if there is a similar project or document that already exist, right? We reuse things in very smart ways. We don't waste people's time. We don't send unclear emails because we know that an unclear email leads to back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, or it leads to misdirected action. So it's about efficiency within the collaborative processes so that we don't waste time within those so that people can be productive. So efficiency is a foundation to productivity. 

Jeff Frick
Right. I love that because it's just I think most bosses have no idea the shit storm they can create with an unclear email, and an email just by default because of its very nature is a crappy communication tool anyway. You throw in some insecure reader catching nuances that necessarily aren't even there, it's a horrible way. But I want to talk about another thing which is signaling in off hours. I'm the worst of this only because I work strange hours. I get up ridiculously early. It's just what I do. I sometimes don't think through the impact of sending something when it's just, I do it because it's on my mind and I thought of it and I want to send it. The reception when potentially somebody's phone buzzes at the other end and they're not maybe as good as I of making sure it's not near their bed. But signaling, you talk about is so important that senior leadership signals to everybody that these are behaviors that we're not only telling you to do, but we're actually going to do ourselves which is actually more important than telling you that we're going to do it, including things like going home at the end of the day and taking vacations. I wonder if you can speak to the importance of executive signaling. 

Shani Harmon
It's so critical because whether or not they want it to be true, executive leaders cast a huge shadow in their organization. As you were saying earlier, the simple I wonder if or we should think about this can generate projects that can go on for years. The leader doesn't even know that they started something with a simple question. So question. So they have to be really intentional and conscious about their own behaviors because it has a huge impact. So we published an article in Harvard Business Review using data from Microsoft that shows that if managers send emails on Sunday, their employees are much more likely too as well, right? Because nobody wants to wake up to the Monday morning barrage of emails from their from their boss where they opted to stay off of their device for the weekend and then sort of pay the consequence of being behind the moment that they start their day on Monday. To your point, we all have different work preferences and you can say as a leader, " leader, "You know what, I like to catch up on Sunday. I don't expect you to respond." It doesn't work because it's sort of like you say that, but what you really mean is, "If I was dedicated like you are, I would work on Sunday too." You don't even have to go as far as set a delivery date, which we all know you can do. Put them in a draft folder and send it at 9 AM or 10 AM on Monday. You've just had a very productive Monday morning for all the things that you wrote on Sunday. But you didn't create any of those anxiety responses in your team or sort of set that expectation. The other leader signal that we've really fought against is multitasking in meetings. Because the signal that that sends is I am so important, I cannot be in one place at a time. Who would not want to be so important? So if I see my leader doing it, then it actually says this is the accepted and desired behavior here. So when we're trying to wean organizations off of the disease of multitasking, because Jeff, it's not a real thing. We don't have multiple processors. We have one so we're- 

Jeff Frick
Multiple distractions. 

Shani Harmon
Exactly. So we're just task switching. Every time we do that, it takes cognitive power out and we do not have an infinite amount of cognitive power, right? So we try to get leaders to put their devices away. If you're in a conversation, be in the conversation. Give people the gift of your full attention the likelihood is you could probably wrap that meeting up in 20 minutes if everybody actually just was in the problem we're trying to solve or in the discussion. But instead, everybody's half in, but they're half in in different moments. That's only gotten worse in an all remote environment because we think we're being sly. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. Well, let me ask you about a couple protocol things on meetings. One is kind of the back channel, not so much in the context of back channel and multitasking. That's bad. But I don't know, I thought I saw maybe two different versions of the back channel. Kind of a direct IM in the context of a meeting. One is it's bad, right? Because people are doing other things. But on the other hand, I thought I saw somewhere maybe doing research that there is a time and a place maybe where you want to use a back channel to encourage someone's participation. I was a little confused so I wonder if you can... Then the other one is cameras, right? We hear both sides on the cameras. On one side, it's everybody turn your camera on. On the other hand, it's a lot of pressure to have your camera on all the time because you didn't have time to take a shower before the 8 AM meeting this morning. So I wonder if you could share kind of meeting etiquette in this world, what works best, what's does not.

Shani Harmon
Well, let's start with the camera issue. I have a very strong point of view, and a lot of organizations do not agree with this point of view, which is you're at work, being physically there is kind of what is expected, right? We participate much more effectively. We build relationship by being on camera. We've started to give ourselves pretty high pass on what I'm wearing, what my hair looks like. It doesn't matter anymore. So there's really no excuse not to be on camera unless you're dropping your kids off at school, et cetera. But then why is the meeting scheduled at this time, right? So if you think about, if we had fewer meetings, we could put them at times where we are fully in it for work and then save those other times where we're only half available to do the things we're only half available for. So part of that is just not minding your own calendar or sort of paying attention to the conflicts that you have or saying like, " like, "Well, if I didn't have time to shower and I needed to be in the office at 8:00, I'd be in the office at 8:00. So why is a remote call a different protocol?

Jeff Frick
Well, the part that I'm hearing protocol even more is if it's a meeting that I'm engaged in, of course I'm going to be there and on time. I'm going to have the camera. Because it's an important meeting for me and I'm a participant and I have something to contribute. It just makes me think, of course, nobody wants their camera on when it's an hour long status meeting that I have nothing to say. That's the one I don't really need to prepare anything for. So why should I need to be engaged? It's interesting.

Shani Harmon
Then why are you wasting your hour being there?

Jeff Frick
It's almost like it's ineffectiveness, right? 

Shani Harmon
Right. We think, "Well, we'll just listen for something that's relevant to me." But that means that you're that you're only half attending to whatever other tasks that you're doing, right? If that's making breakfast for your kids, it's probably fine. But if it's actually thinking about something or answering an email thoughtfully, your brain will focus on that thing and so you're not listening. So you're just kind of doing a disservice on both sides of the coin. Just say no. Just don't go.

Jeff Frick
Right, right.

Shani Harmon
Then to the back channel question, I think chat can be a very effective way to get introverts to engage in a conversation, or if you need lots of input but you don't have a lot of time, hey, everyone put their initial thought on the best option in chat and then we'll kind of see where we are. So we're basically taking kind of a straw poll. You can always use hand raise or other tools that are embedded in the platforms. Those are great. You can also use direct chat to say, "Hey, we only have 10 minutes left and we're on the first objective. Just wanted to call that out to you as the meeting host so you can decide how to handle it." So there are lots of ways that you can improve the quality of the meeting as a participant, not the leader, but just with simple kind of interventions like that. Or you can direct chat someone to say, 'Jeff, I know you have a point of view about this. I'm curious as to why you haven't spoken up yet.' 

Jeff Frick
Right, right.

Shani Harmon
Just kind of without verbally saying, "Hey, Jeff, what do you think?" Because maybe there's five reasons you don't want to talk about this right now. What's not a great back channel is the snarky Slacks on the side where you're sort of commentating about what's going on in the meeting. Because it's A, polluting your own mind about how you're receiving what's happening in that conversation and you're distracting yourself and you're spreading negativity. All those things where they're habits that were acceptable in old organizational life. They're just not anymore. I think we've all gotten a greater mindfulness about how organizations and human psychology and behavior all interact with each other, which just causes us to need to be more thoughtful about how to engage.

Jeff Frick
Right, right. As you're talking about it, it's almost more like it's a symptom of a bad meeting etiquette and super inefficiency that we've built this crazy bad meeting cultures most places, which are inefficient and long and boring and most people don't need to be there and need to be there and I got other stuff to do. So it's almost like, again, to your point, I love, if I'm engaged and I'm an important participant in the decisions that are being made at this group of people that are called a meeting, I'm going to be there. I'm not going to be snarky. It's only when I probably shouldn't be there in the first place. Okay. Shani, so let's talk about some of these other fresh start guides, which I also think is pretty interesting. You guys have a special guide for aim for a happy day, start your day happy and smiling. I love that. But there's some really simple things, and I go back to the show on social media, social dilemma, which one of my great takeaways from that is if you use the tool, it's great. When the tool starts using you, that's when it gets not so great. Yeah. The essence of this is kind of intentional control of the tools, stay control of your life. So I want to go through some of these basic things. One, stop the meeting madness. So even as you say, enjoy maybe missing a few if you're not in control. Decline a couple. You don't necessarily have to go to them all. Ghost your email. I had a whole segment once talking about email and this crazy monster that is email. Again, I think it's worth a little bit deeper discussion in terms of how to help people manage this beast that's no longer on just their work computer, but it's in their pocket or their purse and it's there 24/7. 

Shani Harmon
Email is really challenging for all of us, right? The average executive gets 123 emails a day and that's a number that is growing, right? So that's a tremendous workload for people if A, you feel that your job is to read and respond to all of those things. But what tends to happen is people either become absentees to their own email inboxes. So leaders who become unreliable readers and responders to email, that's a problem in and of itself because then people lack mechanisms for moving work forward. So the leader becomes a bottleneck. On the other end, if the leader actually chooses to engage in all their email, they're not going to have time to do anything else, or they're going to be up all night sort of doing that. So that. So what is a healthy relationship to email? It starts with A, sort of being able to screen and sort, so knowing... You can set up plenty of rules that are like if it's from this newsletter I'm subscribing to, or it's my daily what's going on in the stock market, send it to a folder. When you have that spare time, you're sitting at an airport lobby and you want to kind of review those things, you know where they are, but they're not actually in your inbox. Ask people to help you sort. So we use subject line headers. So it's just basically a bracketed subject line at the beginning, inform, input, action, that helps signal. I mean, we have so much information coming at us all day. It just helps signal what is the necessary move for you as the recipient. Then all the best practices says that you should only process email in batches, that you should not graze email all day. Because grazing is distraction and

Jeff Frick
They call it grazing, grazing email all day?

Shani Harmon
Yes. Grazing email all day. So your inbox is somebody else's kind of to-do list outbox, right? So oftentimes they're sending you work to do. I suspect you already have work to do so we would suggest that you read email really three times a day. So somewhere around mid-morning, not first thing in the morning and I'll tell you why, mid-afternoon and then at the very end of the day. 

Jeff Frick
How many hours during those windows? 

Shani Harmon
45 minutes. 

Jeff Frick
45 minutes, that's it.

Shani Harmon
Because basically if you start your day in email, we've all done this, right? You get trapped.

Jeff Frick
You're preaching to the choir. You're preaching to the choir right here. 

Shani Harmon
It's a cognitive load. There's no order to it, right? It's the order it came in. But some of it matters a lot more than others. So being able to sort based on, oh, senders. You can also do it so that if it's an email from your boss, it flags or puts high importance on it as it comes in. There's so many ways that the tools are trying to help us. It's overwhelming. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right.

Shani Harmon
Right. But if you know what you're trying to do, you can find the mechanism within your platforms to do it versus getting lost in all the bells and whistles that the platforms have. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. I remember years ago, just doing some work with Atlassian and they had a thing inside, right? No internal email, everything was a Jira ticket or on Confluence or whatever, right? Again, they had their own systems that they built. It's their company. It's their business. But I wonder if you can speak to the growth of, I don't know, percentage of messages or percentage of time on these kind of platforms now, these work platforms, where there is an opportunity to at least get a lot of the internal communications off email and into whether it's a room around a particular topic or a DM or a group DM or something. Have you seen those continue to rise in terms of a percentage? Then are people willing to let something else loose? I'm comfortable with my 45 minutes three times a day on email because most of my internal stuff I'm getting done in these other platforms. 

Shani Harmon
Well, yes, I think forward thinking organizations are moving to, particularly for collaboration on specific projects and specific documents. Isn't it better if all the communication about that thing lives in one place?

Jeff Frick
Right, right

Shani Harmon
So I'm not trying to sort of search through and figure out I know somebody sent me something about this, but I have no idea where it is. So wherever you can migrate the working product to the platforms, A, that takes a tremendous load off email and you can really leverage the capabilities of documents' transparency, right? Again, another reason that we have meetings is because we are afraid of missing something. So when you have transparency of the workflow on a platform, I know what's happening, I know who made the last edit, I know what the different cross functional perspectives are on a particular topic. So it's a wonderful mind map of what is going on with that piece of work. So much better than email.

But some of the other slim down email tricks that you can use are no reply alls, just reply to the person that needs to know. No thank you or got it or good job. Not that we don't want to have appreciation, but what if you just went with the bias of I assume you have it and you'll tell me if you don't versus you have to send me an email to tell me that you do. It brings down email load tremendously just those small changes. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right. So I want to steal a line, I think I got it off your website, which is fascinating that meetings, you guys focus on meetings, is the number one lever for productivity, performance and employee experience, which I'm going to extend to engagement, which I'm going to extend to innovation and speed. I mean, I just wonder if you can speak to some of the returns and some of the experiences when you have clients that actually take a minute to be a little bit more intentional and thoughtful and invest in the processes to do a better job, what the impacts are, what are some of the things that you see when people go through these transformations. Then I guess the second question would be at what level is it done? Is it done by a manager that has had enough and wants to invest in making this better? Is it a divisional thing? How does it usually kind of unfold in your engagement? 

Shani Harmon
Yeah. I mean, it typically unfolds around a pain point, someone who has kind of had enough, or can't we do better, or we've done a lot of work with software organizations inside companies, because they're one of the few knowledge worker functions that is measured, like you can really kind of quantify their output. So much of knowledge work, it's hard to quantify marketing's daily output. So that makes it harder for them to sort of justify the investment of time and energy that it takes to kind of shift these practices. But you've got visionary leaders who kind of see where it could be. You have alumni of organizations like Amazon that really have mastered these kinds of things, or you just have believers.

Those are the ones who are willing to kind of go after this difficult to capture, but incredibly valuable productivity gain. I think that if you go back to decision making, and there's a lot of evidence that decision making A, what is an organization, it's kind of a decision making machine. That's certainly what the leadership team is. The quality of decisions make a huge impact on the performance of that organization. Where do we make decisions? Well, we make them in dialogue with each other which is meetings. So if you think about, if you correlate the quality of our decisions with the quality of our meetings, there's a case for change that actually really matters. There's a lot of science that says the more options that we consider, the more diverse perspectives that we bring to bear on a decision, the higher quality those decisions are.

But what we tend to do is bring people together. Hierarchy takes over. Bad meeting habits take over. So the decision making doesn't get better, it just has a bigger audience because it's still a couple of people who are making all the decisions. Some of that, there's leader hubris involved in that. So leaders may say they want inclusion and more voices, and you have to ask yourself, " yourself, "Do you really?" Or do you feel like I earned the right to be at the top of this organization? I don't want to share decision making authority with others which is their prerogative given where they are. It's just not good for business. It's also not aligned with the times.

There's a huge generational differences in what we expect and we are right in the middle of that moment. Workers 20 years from this will not tolerate this at all. Workers who are 20 years ahead of the middle are pretty comfortable with the way that things have been, but this is our chance to change what work means and it could be so much better. 

Jeff Frick
Right, right, right. Can be so much better. Just to reinforce that, this can't happen, right? This is a cultural situation that you can have. I mean, I go back, my first job in tech was at Intel. We went into those rooms and they had those little signs, but I got to tell you, people respected those signs. I was fascinated. For instance, you have a lot of stuff talking about people that derail the meeting. Well, they have a rule, it's called rat hole. Anyone can just say rat hole, stop talking, next topic. I saw it happen with junior people with more senior people. They have a rule, meeting ends at 10 to the hour. It's like a school bell. It used be funny to stand out in the halls and watch all the doors open at the same time, everybody goes, gets a coffee, takes a pee. Then at the top of the hour, all the doors close again.

It's funny for them, right? It comes from their manufacturing discipline. I felt like I was a chip being optimized. But it works for them. You can create a culture that's much more efficiency and get away from some of these bad habits. But you've been at this forever. We're out of time. I want to give you the last word. What have we not covered? Give people some simple tips. Paint a vision of the future of what they're going to get when they're a little bit more intentional about meeting and stop meeting the way they've been meeting. been meeting. 

Shani Harmon
Well, I think the question for leaders to ask themselves is, 'Am I getting the full collaborative potential out of this organization? What would it mean to our performance if I could?' Because that's the decision moment of should I invest in sort of changing the way that way that we work. So the way that we work is smarter, it's easier. Our mission is to prove it can be joyful and productive. Those things are not in contradiction at all. But we sort of pretend that they are. So seeing meetings differently, seeing them as something that matters, and it's not just meetings, obviously it's the whole collaborative landscape, but really investing time and looking at that and asking yourself if it's serving you. The changes, they're not easy to sustain over time, but they're not hard to make in the short term.

So that's one of the benefits of this is that there's so much value to just be grabbed right now. If you're focused on inclusion and that's a priority for you, we over focus on representation and we under focus on what is a day to day experience that people have in our organization, particularly if they represent a diverse perspective. Well, where do they have that experience? They have it in meetings. Is their voice valued? Is it sought after? How do we actually leverage the diversity that we have, whether it's cognitive or otherwise? So those two things, diversity, things, diversity, equity and inclusion and collaborative effectiveness, they're part and parcel of the same thing. We just haven't been viewing it that way. I think shifting the lens that people use on it could really change the way people think about collaboration.

Jeff Frick
That's great. That's a great summary. Because like you said, how many resources have you bought, paid for, hired and trained that are sitting in the building that you're not taking full advantage of? From utilization point of view, if you want to measure it that way, whatever. I had a post a while back, Greg Jones said, "People are only 64% engaged," with his number. I don't know where he got that number. I don't know where he got that number. But we all know most people aren't fully engaged and you can tell if they are and you can tell if they aren't and you know what a huge asset right underneath your hands. Well, this has been super, Shani. I really appreciate your time. I've been excited about this for a long time. I still think it's one of the coolest names of any business and congratulations on your birthday. Nine years, that's legit. 

Shani Harmon
Thanks very much, Jeff. Pleasure to be here. 

Jeff Frick
Absolutely. Well, for everybody, go to their website. There's these great resources. We didn't even get into the inclusion in real life. That's got a bunch of really simple straightforward stuff like greet everybody by name. What a concept. How difficult is that to do? But a lot of tremendous resources. So thank you again, Shani. It's really been a pleasure. 

Shani Harmon
Great. See you soon. 

Jeff Frick
All right. She's Shani, I'm Jeff. You're watching Work 20XX with Jeff Fick. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching

Cold Close
Excellent.