When meetings become acts of sabotage with Rebecca Hinds

Rebecca Hinds is Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean, a researcher of organizational behavior and collaboration, and the author of the bestselling book Your Best Meeting Ever. Over the course of her career, Rebecca has studied how people work together, how teams make decisions, and how technology shapes collaboration.In this episode, Rebecca joins Subbu to discuss why meetings have become one of the biggest sources of frustration in modern organizations and what leaders can do about it.We explore:Why a World War II-era sabotage manual bears an uncomfortable resemblance to many modern meetingsThe concept of "meeting debt" and how calendars become overloaded over timeWhy equal airtime is one of the strongest predictors of team performanceHow power, status, and hierarchy influence who speaks and who stays silentWhy fewer meeting participants often lead to better outcomesThe hidden costs of pre-meetings and meeting overloadThe debate around cameras on versus cameras off in virtual meetingsWhat research tells us about Zoom fatigue and the unequal burden it places on different groupsHow AI can improve meetings, and the ways in which it can inadvertently make them worseWhy successful AI adoption is ultimately a human and organizational challenge, not just a technological one