Business
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 meetings
- The concept of "meeting debt" and how calendars become overloaded over time
- Why equal airtime is one of the strongest predictors of team performance
- How power, status, and hierarchy influence who speaks and who stays silent
- Why fewer meeting participants often lead to better outcomes
- The hidden costs of pre-meetings and meeting overload
- The debate around cameras on versus cameras off in virtual meetings
- What research tells us about Zoom fatigue and the unequal burden it places on different groups
- How AI can improve meetings, and the ways in which it can inadvertently make them worse
- Why successful AI adoption is ultimately a human and organizational challenge, not just a technological one