Your Meetings Are Your Workplace Culture: 5 Ways To Make Them Better

Key Takeaways:

Meetings are the most visible thing your organization does. That makes them worth fixing, and it makes them the fastest way to change how work feels.

Almost nobody defends their calendar. Yet the meetings people complain about hold some of the clearest evidence of how an organization actually behaves. A values statement describes the workplace culture a company would like to have. Its meetings reveal the one it has.

“I always say that what happens in meetings defines culture,” says Joe Lalley, consultant and author of the book “Question to Learn.” His advice to leaders who want to repair a struggling workplace culture is to start with the calendar rather than the values deck.

Part of the reason meetings drift into dysfunction is that they are so easy to see.

“Most work within our organization is invisible,” says Rebecca Hinds, bestselling author of “Your Best Meeting Ever.” “It’s very hard to see someone thinking deeply through a problem or rewriting the email for the 10th time.”

Meetings are the exception. They are among the most visible forms of work anyone does, which quietly turns them into a marker of standing. As Hinds points out, few things announce your importance inside an organization as loudly as being double or even triple booked.

What is the right length for a meeting?

Put the question to leaders at high-trust workplaces and a clear preference emerges: shorter, and narrower. Chief executives tend to land on under an hour with no more than two topics on the table. Many push further and favour 30 minutes or less. A few manage on 10.

The problem for everyone below the executive floor is that a meeting invitation is not really a scheduling request. It is a social one.

“The words are socially loaded,” Hinds says. “We accept the meeting invite; we reject it. It’s not just ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

That loading turns calendar management into a relationship problem.

“It starts to feel less like we’re cancelling the meeting and more like we’re cancelling the person behind the meeting,” Hinds says. Where an organization lacks shared goals or clear norms, that feeling usually wins, and the recurring invite survives another quarter unexamined.

5 ways to build a healthier workplace culture around your meetings

Hinds is a proponent of the “Meeting Doomsday,” in which an organization clears every recurring meeting off the calendar at once and reintroduces only the ones that can justify themselves. It is a blunt instrument, and it has worked for some organizations, but it is not the only route. These five practices are the foundation.

1. Give people a safe way to flag meetings that are not working. You cannot repair what you cannot see. Hinds recommends opening an anonymous channel or inbox where employees can nominate meetings for review, which gives leaders visibility into the sessions that are quietly consuming the week without producing anything.

Watch for bias in the results. Organizers naturally optimize a meeting for themselves rather than for the people sitting in it, so the person most convinced a meeting is working is often the one least able to judge.

2. Measure your meetings against something objective. A short poll asking attendees whether the last hour was worth their time is a reasonable place to start, Hinds says. Harder data takes you further.

“Do we have a certain subset of meetings where there’s a clear imbalance of airtime?” Hinds asks. “Often that’s an indication that the meeting is actually more like a status update or a briefing.”

Calendar and email analytics can also show how often people are double booked, which raises a useful question about whether the overlap is logistical or performative. Either way, evidence turns a vague sense that your team meetings have become bloated into something a leader can actually act on.

3. Define what actually deserves a meeting. What is a meeting for at your organization? Most teams have never answered that out loud, which is precisely why so much time goes unchallenged.

“Try skipping meeting introductions,” Lalley suggests. Rather than circling the room for names and titles, open with the discussion itself. Going around the table tends to establish a pecking order before anyone has said anything of substance, and the most junior voices rarely recover from it.

Agendas have their own gravity. The first item absorbs more time than it deserves, the last is rushed or dropped entirely, and the easiest topic often crowds out the one that actually matters but feels harder to raise.

Hinds offers a corrective she calls the rule of halves. Look at the core dimensions of a meeting, its length, its attendee list, its agenda and its frequency, and try cutting one or two of them in half.

4. Set guardrails for AI in meetings. “By and large AI has not improved how we meet,” Hinds says. More often it shores up the habits that should have been fixed, such as sending an AI notetaker into a session nobody needed instead of questioning why the session exists.

In her framing, AI can take on three roles in a meeting: automate, advise, and participate. Teams get the most out of the first, letting AI handle notes, scheduling and follow-ups. The second works well too, where AI advises an organizer with data such as how speaking time was distributed. The third, sending AI to participate on your behalf, leaves the underlying problem exactly where it was.

“Optimize for the team, not the individual,” Hinds says. A notetaker that buys back your afternoon has achieved little if your colleagues are no better off. That distinction matters for employee productivity, because individual time saved and collective output gained are not the same measurement.

5. Close the status gap with better virtual meeting etiquette. Mixed-presence meetings are now a permanent feature of Canadian working life rather than a temporary arrangement. Statistics Canada reported that 10.0 per cent of workers regularly split their hours between home and a workplace as of May 2025, and that those workers are spending a growing share of their time on site: 44.7 per cent worked at least half their hours outside the home, up from 40.0 per cent two years earlier.

That means the room is rarely all in one place, and the fault lines this creates are stable enough to be worth designing around. Strong workplace communication in these settings depends on deliberate practice rather than goodwill.

• Invite remote participants to speak first: before the people in the room fill the silence.
• Pair each remote participant with an in-room buddy: someone responsible for making sure their contributions are heard and picked up.
• Keep meetings off the lunch hour: the informal conversation before and after hands in-person attendees an advantage nobody planned to give them.

None of this is complicated. It is simply the difference between remote work being tolerated and being treated as equal.

Meetings are where your workplace culture becomes visible

Every fix above is small on its own. What makes them worth the effort is that meetings are where employees form their most durable impressions of an organization: who gets heard, whose time is treated as valuable, and whether stated priorities survive contact with the calendar. A workplace culture is built or eroded in those rooms, week after week, long before anyone writes it down.

Finding out what your people actually experience is the place to start. The Trust Index™ Survey measures how employees experience your organization, including whether they feel able to speak up, and gives leaders the evidence to act. To understand how that trust connects to performance, explore the Great Place To Work Effect.

How is your organization trying to meet better in 2026?

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This article is an adaptation of the original Great Place To Work®, written by Raven Trice, Digital Marketing Program Manager.

 

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People Also Asked

What is virtual meeting etiquette?
It is the set of shared norms that make a video or hybrid meeting work for everyone in it, regardless of where they are sitting. In practice it covers who speaks when, how remote participants are brought into the discussion, camera and mute conventions, and how decisions are captured so nobody is disadvantaged by being off site.

How long should a team meeting be?
Most leaders at high-trust workplaces settle somewhere under an hour, and a large share prefer 30 minutes or less. The more reliable guide than duration is scope: two topics is a workable ceiling, and anything beyond that is usually two meetings wearing one invitation.

How do you run a meeting where remote and in-person people are both present?
Design for the people who are not in the room. Bring remote participants in first, give each one an in-room colleague responsible for making sure their points are heard, and avoid scheduling around meals or breaks when side conversations give the in-person group a head start.

Should you use an AI notetaker in meetings?
Yes, for the work AI genuinely does better: capturing notes, handling scheduling, and tracking follow-ups. The caution is using it as a substitute for attendance or as cover for a meeting that should not be happening, which saves one person time while leaving the team exactly where it was.

How do you measure whether meetings are working?
Pair a simple attendee poll on whether the time was worth it with objective signals such as the distribution of speaking time and how often people are double booked. Lopsided airtime usually means the session is a briefing that could have been written down.

What is Great Place To Work Certification™?
Certification is recognition earned on the strength of what your own employees report through the Trust Index™ Survey. It validates your culture internally and signals it to the Canadian talent market externally.

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