Coaching for Leaders
772: How to Measure Your Meeting’s Success, with Rebecca Hinds
Coaching for Leaders
•March 2, 2026•39 min
0
Coaching for Leaders•Mar 2, 2026
Why It Matters
Meetings consume a huge portion of workplace time, yet most organizations lack clear metrics to assess their value, leading to wasted resources and employee frustration. By adopting simple, evidence‑based measurement practices like ROTI, leaders can improve productivity, reduce meeting fatigue, and ensure that time spent together drives real outcomes—making the episode especially relevant for anyone looking to optimize modern work environments.
Key Takeaways
- •Meetings cost organizations billions; measuring reveals hidden inefficiencies.
- •ROTI (Return on Time Invested) provides actionable meeting effectiveness scores.
- •Anonymous, occasional feedback prevents bias and survey fatigue.
- •Ten-hour weekly meeting threshold signals over‑scheduling and trust issues.
- •Redesigning or eliminating legacy meetings saves significant employee time.
Pulse Analysis
In today’s knowledge‑driven workplaces, meetings dominate calendars yet remain one of the least measured activities. Rebecca Hinds highlights how organizations unknowingly waste billions by treating meetings as a default process rather than a product to be optimized. She references the World War II Simple Sabotage Field Manual to illustrate that inefficient meetings have long been a deliberate tactic for slowing progress. Modern leaders, however, can flip that script by quantifying meeting costs—salary‑based calculations, time spent, and even indirect expenses—to create a shock‑value baseline that awakens teams to hidden inefficiencies.
Beyond raw cost, Hinds advocates for Return on Time Invested (ROTI), a simple zero‑to‑five rating collected from attendees after roughly ten percent of meetings. When paired with an anonymous follow‑up question—"What would raise this score by one point?"—ROTI surfaces actionable insights while avoiding the social bias that inflates public ratings. She warns against over‑reliance on cost metrics, which can incentivize ultra‑short meetings that sacrifice strategic value, and stresses the importance of periodic, not constant, feedback to prevent survey fatigue. Anonymous surveys also protect honest input, especially from quieter participants whose perspectives often differ from the organizer’s.
Practical implementation starts with a data‑driven guardrail: ten hours of meeting time per week per employee. Exceeding this threshold typically signals over‑scheduling, low trust, or an over‑reliance on synchronous communication. Hinds describes “meeting doomsday” resets—48‑hour calendar overhauls—that reveal legacy meetings ready for elimination and highlight opportunities to shrink durations. By redesigning meetings, shifting appropriate discussions to asynchronous channels, and continuously iterating based on ROTI feedback, organizations can reclaim dozens of hours each month. The result is not just cost savings but higher productivity, better decision‑making, and a culture that treats meetings as high‑impact products rather than inevitable obligations.
Episode Description
Rebecca Hinds: Your Best Meeting Ever
Rebecca Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She founded and led the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, where she partners with leading experts to help organizations transform their work with AI. She is the author of Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done (Amazon, Bookshop)*.
Considering the amount of time we all spend in meetings, it’s odd that most organizations do so little to measure meeting results. If that’s sounding familiar, this conversation between Rebecca and me will show you exactly how to get started.
Key Points
Metrics that only measure the costs of meetings (dollars and time) can be useful, but rarely capture the full picture.
Use Return on Time Invested (ROTI) anonymously to survey attendees to determine if a meeting was a good use of time. Also ask, “What would it take for you to improve your rating by one point?”
Survey sparingly to avoid survey fatigue. Bringing in a survey 10% of the time is a benchmark to start from.
If the amount of time in meetings vastly exceeds 10 hours a week, there’s likely an opportunity to scale back or redefine the work before or after meetings to use time better.
Equal speaking time in meetings is a key indicator of team performance. Be transparent with employees about any technology you use to capture data.
Punctuality and attendance rate are indicators of how valued meetings are for people.
Resources Mentioned
Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done by Rebecca Hinds (Amazon, Bookshop)*
Interview Notes
Download my interview notes in PDF format (free membership required).
Related Episodes
How to Lead Meetings That Get Results, with Mamie Kanfer Stewart (episode 358)
Moving Towards Meetings of Significance, with Seth Godin (episode 632)
How to Lead Engaging Meetings, with Jess Britt (episode 721)
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