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Helen's award-winning business book: The Future of Time: how 're-working' time can help you boost productivity, diversity and wellbeing.

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Register here for my next free webinar 'Fewer, better meetings' at 12pm BST on 29th June.

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My interview on 'We need a new attitude to time' for Make A Difference Media

The M.A.D. World conference

Vijay on Linked In

Forbes article and MIT Sloan Management Review article about Vijay's research

Tariy app for meetings

Transcript:

Helen: This week I'm delighted to welcome Professor Vijay Pereira as my guest. Vijay is Full Professor of International and Strategic Human Capital Management at NEOMA Business School in France, and also Chair of the People & Organisations Department there. In addition, he's Distinguished Full Professor at the Goa Institute of Management in India.

And he holds adjunct or part-time professorial positions at the University of South Pacific in Fiji, and at the Universities of Portsmouth and Manchester here in the UK. Alongside his academic roles, Vijay holds a number of senior editorial positions, including being Editor in Chief of the journal International Studies of Management and Organizations.

His own work has been published in over 150 leading journals, including Human Resource Management, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, the Academy of Management, and the Journal of Business Ethics, and in 10 books. In the year 2021/22, he was the second ranked publishing scholar in business and management globally and ranked number one in Europe.

He's currently serving as Vice President of the Academy of International Business for the Middle East and North Africa region.

Welcome to The Business of Being Brilliant, Vijay!

Vijay: Thank you, Helen. Glad to be with you today.

Helen: That's an incredibly impressive CV and list of academic papers and research writings that I think I've ever read out. So, many congratulations on so many achievements and really fascinated by the different professorial roles you hold and how scattered they are around the world. I'm curious to know if that ever presents like a scheduling headache or a logistics headache or involve vast quantities of international travel?

Vijay: No, I enjoy doing this and I have connections in different parts as you know. But really, I enjoy travelling, I'm off to China in two days, back then in the UK and then visit to the US. It's, it's been hectic, but I'm enjoying it. That's most important.

Helen: Yes, it feels good to be back connecting with people in person around the world after our 2, 3 years of vastly reduced travel. That's great. And I've given people a very quick flavour from your professional bio of your roles and the type of work that you lead. Could you say a little bit more about, I guess in your own words, what you focus on in your research and your teaching and your work at the present time?

Vijay: Yeah. Thanks, thanks, Helen. My work revolves around three major topics. One is international business, the second is strategy - how firms strategize and plan long term - and the third is human capital, which means that people are key to different countries, to different industries, to different firms.

And so my work is at the intersection of these three broad areas, which means that people at country level or at industry level, or even at firm level are important. Often people talk about human resources, which is a micro level, but I'll look at human capital from a more broader perspective, more global perspective, and then zero in on the industry or the firm level. And again, it's international business and strategy. And that's my position, it's a professor of strategic and international human capital management.

Helen: Okay, thank you for explaining that. So as well as advising companies, I guess, and sharing academic, research around strategy in terms of what businesses, what directions they should be going in, and what markets they might be exploring, you, you also look at the bird's eye view of what people and talent and skills they need to achieve that.

But then it sounds like you also.. You get down into the detail as well with specific industries and perhaps specific companies around okay, so how do we get our people to help us achieve that strategy? Is that right?

Vijay: Correct, correct. And most of my colleagues specify and are getting into one or the other. I'm trying to look at it in, in its totality, you know? One can't be separated from the other. So very, very quickly an example is we need STEM graduates in the UK. We are struggling, but what, what is it that we can do at industry level, let's say the finance sector or the IT sector? And that becomes a little bit more macro. And then we go and say, what is the UK plan or strategy of the Government of the UK or EU as a region? So that we can build upon: how many do we bring from outside, which are immigrants? How many can we train within? And so that's the broader picture, but it results in micro industry which we call a meso, but also then a, a firm or a company's issues, so you can't separate them. That's my point.

Helen: Yes. They're like Russian dolls really. Yeah. Yeah. Well and that's fascinating to hear that your role encompasses the whole set of dolls. Because I, coming from a consulting background in people and change, very aware that there are big strategy consulting firms and big organizational consulting firms and then big people consulting firms. And they were often quite, quite divided up and each might want to play in the other, other field, but few, rarely did across all three successfully. So, yeah.

And so we got connected because I came across some absolutely fascinating research that you co-led into ' the surprising impact of meeting-free days'.  And so we're going to use most of the rest of our conversation time today to hear a bit more about that and explore the methodology and the really interesting findings and hopefully give listeners a bit of a practical steer on - if this sounds really relevant and of interest to them - how might they start to approach adopting something similar in their organization?

So I read the article in the MIT Sloan Management Review that was published in January last year, January, 2022, which gave a fantastic overview and I'll pop a link to that in the show notes. But could you just let us know how this study, first of all, came about and what the scope of it was?

Vijay: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, thanks Helen. So the January and February of last year, we published on the same topic, but different views on meeting free days. So one, as you mentioned, was the MIT Sloan Management Review piece, but also in the Harvard Business Review. And then we had a follow up in Forbes, a very good piece in Forbes that brought the two together.

And answering your question really, it was the elephant in the room, the topic about meetings being ineffective. And we were at a conference and post-conference, we all looked at our diaries and said we should meet up online. And this was way back 2018/2019 before the pandemic, of course.

And we said, oh, meetings, meetings, meetings. And at that point of time we said, Hey, is there any evidence that meetings, and the number of meetings we have, are as productive as we make it out to be? Like I said, there was talk, but there was no evidence.

So we said, okay and we looked. And there was no research on meetings and its productivity or unproductivity, if I may. And so we said, okay, let's do some initial, basic (as we researchers called) search in terms of what actually people say and is there actually any evidence that could be non-academic?

So we looked at consulting notes, being consultants in the past and, and no there was nothing. And so it was very exciting! When there is nothing, it's exciting, but it's also very difficult. So we began to do a preliminary study and looked at some of the non-academic surveys that were there, and we found that 71% of people who actually were interviewed formally/informally said that it was not productive, not as productive as it should be.

And most interestingly, Helen, 85% of people who we asked and we looked at other surveys, said the same thing: that 85% of their time was spent on meetings. So imagine you have an executive in London who earns £100,000 a year; £85,000 of that money is spent on meetings, if you can look at it that way. Because you pay people money for time, and if that time is spent on unproductive activities such as meetings, it's not productive for the employee, for the firm, and for even greater things such as, let's say, the economy.

It's not, because you're wasting your time on unproductive activity for money.  And so we thought, let's get deeper into this. And then we did a real study, which was time consuming and also the pandemic hit in, which meant that a hundred percent of a person's time and more was spent on meetings. Because they couldn't meet physically, they were meeting more and more online.

And so it was perfect timing for us in terms of getting into the bottom of this really.

Helen: Really interesting to hear and particularly how, in a funny way, the arrival of COVID in a way created almost the perfect conditions for you to do the in-depth study. And it is a shocking statistic that 85% of knowledge workers' time is spent on meetings and I love the way how you just translate that into commercial implications. Is that really what we are paying people for? And are we getting the value that we want out of that time that is spent in meetings? And interesting to hear that there wasn't really any substantial academic research around this.

So could you tell me a little bit about the methodology then for this study, how you went about gathering the data?

Vijay: Yeah, so I think when we started, we thought this needs a real in-depth study and something that will add value. As seasoned academics, I have my collaborators in the UK mostly, and other parts of the world, and we thought, we get proper data. Data is key. And then we do a proper analysis because it has to stick, there needs to be proper evidence. And so we spread the net far and wide and reached around a thousand companies, what they were doing. That was very important.

And we found that very few companies, in fact less than 1%, actually tried to have a meeting free day in a week. And so what we did is then we, we went in and asked a large consultancy to help us in this process. So they identified around a hundred companies that were interested. Now we had certain conditions in terms of those firms or companies that were interested to be part of our data set, sort of a profile of companies that we thought would be ideal.

So we said the first condition should be that they should be multinational or international, which means operate in two or more countries other than their home country. That was the first.

The second was that they should employ at least a thousand employees.

And then we set the conditions to the study itself. So these were the qualifying conditions, and then you had the conditions to the study itself, which meant that firms or companies needed to sign up that they would in practice and in reality, have at least one to a maximum of five, no-meeting days a week. That was the third important and the fourth that they should run this for at least a year because that's when we would go in and see what did they do during that one year period where employees and managers had between one to five, no-meeting days a week for a year. So yeah. Sorry.

Helen: No, that's fine. It's fascinating that you were very clear upfront with people about the terms of participating.

Vijay: Yeah. And so 76 companies signed up and collectively, these 76 companies had 25,000 employees, which was very rich. And again, just to clarify, these were high tech companies, service sector, not manufacturing because the autonomy and knowledge workers are mostly in these high tech companies.

And again, these were east, west, north, south. Whenever I do my presentations, there's, oh, were these European? Were they American? Were they, you know..? yeah. These were spread across, which means Asia as well as Latin America, and so on, so forth. So other emerging countries were also part of it. And in, in today's globalized world, you have firms that are international or multinational that are spread across time zones, geographies, and so on.

And so, coming Helen to how, in terms of the method: so we examined performance or productivity of individual employees or managers before and after. Okay? So We not only asked 'how was your performance?', but we also asked your manager, 'how was your performance?' And we looked at your two points of performance appraisals that we saw. Let's say 2021 January, you start the no-meeting day, and you end in December of 2021. We looked at your performance for the year of 2020 vis-a-vis 2021.

And that's how we compared the two points of your performance. So what we call it academically, we triangulated the data to see that not only how you felt or your manager felt about you, but on paper was your per performance better or worse, or same.

Helen: Yes. That makes sense. Yeah. Great. So you've explained how you approached the methodology from a productivity and performance point of view, measuring before and after the trial period for each company. Were there other elements to the methodology?

Vijay: Indeed. So actually, when people read our research and I do these presentations and the question is: is it only about the organization? Is it only about productivity? No, it's also about the human side of things. I mean, people really, really want to make the best use of the time and actually contribute and add value, which means work-life balance. And meetings were an overkill in terms of the time. And so it was also about how people are less stressful and how people have more time in terms of a work-life balance. And I'll tell you other stories you know, in terms of how, when it actually ran for a year, people's lives changed. Literally. That's what they said. And it had a corresponding effect on their performance.

So it's actually that if people are more into their zone, have a better work-life balance, they perform better.

This was the other part we wanted to test. And so overall, in terms of what variables we tested there were: autonomy communication, cooperation, engagement levels, micromanagement levels, productivity, satisfaction, and stress.

So these were a broad spectrum of variables and we looked at the impact no-meeting days had on these variables.

Helen: Yeah, thank you. And I know in the Sloan MIT Review article that I read , there's a great table summarizing those eight elements and then the impact of 1, 2, 3, 4, and five meeting free days. And, and it's quite interesting, isn't it, because we'll come on a bit to talk about the difference between one versus five meeting free days. But, but overall, the key finding or the headline findings from your study was that people's productivity went up enormously with at least two meeting free days per week. And I think you said the optimum was three, is that right?

Vijay: Correct, correct.

Helen: So two days of meetings and three meeting free days.

But what I found really interesting is that, in your research you explained that productivity went up because people felt relieved not to be micromanaged so much, relieved to have more autonomy in how to allocate their working time and also they felt interestingly, much more accountable for delivering.  So that sat much more squarely on their shoulders, which actually then also made them feel they had greater satisfaction with their work. So it's not just about the efficiency side, it's very much about how people feel about delivering their work.

Vijay: Absolutely. I mean, you can't see each of these eight elements or variables independently. They're interconnected because we are asking these rounded questions about a single individual. And again, like I said, we triangulated; we are not saying that, okay, we take your word Helen, how do you feel about it? And Helen says, this is how I feel. But we asked Helen's manager and Helen's manager confirms, and then we go back to seeing actually on paper how Helen was better in terms of all of these.

Helen: Yeah, so lots of different elements of data that you are pulling in. And in case anyone's wondering whether the benefits just keep accruing the more you cut meetings out of your collective work diaries, the answer is no, not really, isn't it? There is the law of diminishing returns and some aspects like autonomy keep going up, but other things like productivity actually start to decline again after three meeting-free days. Is that right?

Vijay: Yes, we call it the inverted U because there is an optimal level, and that's what we show in the paper. It's 3, because also then we have to go back to the basic question of why do we have meetings? So there is this element of control, of organizing, of planning, of strategizing, of accountability, very importantly. And I think human beings generally need to be independent, but also there is this element of '' hey am I too independent? You know? And there's a lot of evidence that say that control is important when it comes to work, some sort of control.

Otherwise it's too much of autonomy or too much of anything really isn't it? Too much of autonomy or too much of control as well, so that mid-level needs to be found. And in our study we found that really, it's the three days where you can be really productive, but then two days you have to be accountable for that productivity. You have to engage through meetings for future planning. So it's both accountability and future planning that are key to the two days.

Now also importantly, Helen, is that you are better prepared for the two-day meetings because people need time for meetings. The classic back-to-back meetings, what does it mean that you have no time to prepare? So it's already a waste of time because you're entering into meetings without being prepared physically and mentally for the meeting. So people have time to prepare and plan and do what they are supposed to do, deliver, produce. And so the two days are what we are suggesting to have the meetings because that would be also the most productive meeting time.

Helen: Yes, yes. I think you absolutely call out something that we all fail routinely to acknowledge that actually to have a good quality meeting, we need time to prepare. And I know from talking to people and from reading about other research as well, people just don't have that time. They are back to back.

Now, I'd love to get a bit into the dynamics that happened around the study. So how difficult did you find it or how difficult was it to get leaders on board with doing this trial? Were they clamouring to be part of the study because they recognised this is a problem, wasted meeting time? Or did they need a lot of persuading of the potential business benefits?

Vijay:  Not really. It is a management prerogative, isn't it? Meeting is controlled by managers. They feel empowered and they feel that meetings should happen. So it was very difficult to bring on leaders and managers on board, but deep down, they knew themselves that they needed evidence. And so it took some convincing on our part to say that, go for it, go go with this idea for a year. If the results are not positive, you continue doing what you do. But also there was no evidence that what they are doing in terms of the number of meetings they're having led to any greater productivity or greater satisfaction, greater efficiency, all of these key terms that we use as managers.

So there was no evidence. So we said, okay, let's test it and you'll get the results. Again, you're not alone in this. So it took some convincing on our part and they were not as enthusiastic when we started out, but when the results came, it was a different game.

Helen: Yeah, really interesting because I guess you are pinpointing their uncertainty. Are we working in these ways but actually there's very little benefit to us as a business to do that? And positioning it obviously as a trial and you don't have to commit to anything permanently, I always think that's a great way to try something new - say it's for a fixed period of time and we're going to learn what we can from it and then make a decision after that.

Vijay: Yeah. The other interesting part of this is and this is mostly our Harvard Business Review piece, is that what age or what age group of managers were pushing for more meetings? And when I asked this question 9 out of 10, 8 out 10 and the best case scenarios, 7 out of 10 say it's the older managers, and that's the wrong answer.

The younger managers were pushing for more meetings and we dug deeper into that. Why? And obviously the younger managers wanted to be seen, wanted to learn, wanted to create that network; vis-a-vis the older ones who had already had that experience, network knowledge, and so on.

And also then we have another piece that shows that these younger managers then were more prone to burn out because they were pushing for more meetings.

And so indirectly or directly, this push for being more successful very quickly, knowledge network, all of this was pushing for more meetings that led to greater burnout of these younger managers.

Helen: Yeah, that's so fascinating, the different needs and also the assumptions turning out to be quite wrong around this. So for anyone listening that's thinking, ugh, we have meeting overload in our organization, we know intuitively it's not the best way to be working. But it feels impossible to change the culture around it and I love the sound of the study, but there's no way we'd ever get the whole organization or our whole leadership team to agree to instigating even one meeting-free day per week across the board, what advice would you offer to them? Where would they start and how do you even persuade people to put in place an organizational wide, effectively meeting ban for at least one day a week, successfully?

Vijay: Yeah, I mean, we have the evidence but again, like I said earlier Helen, I mean, go and try it. You know? Worst case scenario, it'll not work. But the evidence is against all of this, that it's not going to work. The evidence is that it will work.

Let me give you a very funny example.

So one of the 76 companies that finally signed up to be part of our study met 17 times on an average of an hour and a half to decide if they were going to join us. So just imagine! That's, yeah. Yeah. And therein rests our case. I mean, 17 times at an hour and a half on an average, is a lot of time spent on whether we should meet or not meet.

Helen: It's just a fantastic example! that's what, the best part of 25, nearly 30 hours of numerous people's time invested in making one decision about whether to do this. The cost of that to the business is incredible and that's partly why your research just fascinates me so much.

It links very strongly to what I talk about in my book is how we don't value time properly and we don't think about what return on investment are we getting as individuals and as businesses for the time that we invest in different types of work activities and meetings is just probably the biggest time drain that certainly I hear people talk about.

So go try it. Try it as a trial, you are suggesting to people. The evidence will show it works. And it sounds like it's important to be clear at the outset of the trial how you are going to measure it and ideally not just to have self-reported data, but to try and have some objective data, whether that's performance score, evaluation scores or are there other example metrics people can look at?

Vijay: Yeah. Yeah, just coming in again on that, which should be very interesting, and this is our ongoing research, Helen. It's on how many firms, small, medium, or large, actually calculate how much they spend on meetings. You ask a CHRO or a CFO, how much they spend on meetings? They have no clue. So our research and going forward is we are now calculating how much firms spend vis-a-vis the decisions that come out or the outcome of meetings. Okay? So people in business want to have real hard numbers and the bottom line being financial. So here we talking financials. Okay, how much do do you spend? And which part of your business or which group of people in your business spend more time on meetings?

So we have come up with an app that in real time calculates how much is being spent on meetings vis-a-vis the outcome of the meeting. So we met 17 times to sign up to Vijay's study; this is how much we spent, but was it worth it at the end of the day? And a year later, are we actually better off financially, emotionally, in all sense in terms of taking that decision? So if you don't measure, you won't know.

Helen: Yes. Yeah, it needs to be concrete evidence and it sounds tricky for anyone who's not an expert academic researcher and maybe just say in an HR function or an operational role to draw the link between the meeting-free time and the impact on business. About meeting outcomes and business performance.

But it's very worthwhile doing that because that's the commercial incentive, right? That's the strategic incentive. Yeah.

And so my final question, I could ask you questions about this for hours, but I'm conscious we don't, we don't have all day for the podcast! But have you followed up with any of those organizations that were in the trial? Do you know how many of them have continued to stick with their chosen pattern or a degree of that? Or have they gently slid back into pre-trial ways of working?

Vijay: Oh, no, no, no, no. In fact, many other companies from outside have signed up to this. I mean, Microsoft, in their Future of Work document have dedicated a whole page and it's page number 28 of the Microsoft New Future of Work Report that says, here is the evidence. And it has become part of their strategy across Microsoft. The other was Twitter. Bloomberg at the start of this year reported Shopify on our research has no-meeting days, and that Bloomberg report, Helen, we had 138 million hits on that story!

Helen: Well, I was definitely one of them because I remember that research and then I was sending it to people that I know saying, this is fascinating. I hadn't realized that Shopify was one of the organizations in your trial.

Vijay: Yeah yeah. So they made it a rule in just before Christmas that you can have x number of days in a week and you don't need to go to these meetings if you don't feel that you can add value. So answering your question, not only those 76, but across the world, it has had a huge impact and it's growing.

I, I was at the University of Bergen in Norway and presented this meetings and the senior people said, oh can you do us an email and we'll send it to the authorities? And we make it a rule straightaway. So, it's many, many, many companies, small, medium, large multinational, who recognize that this is an important step for not only increasing productivity, efficiency on one hand, but also work-life balance on the other.

People need space, they need time, they need autonomy.

Helen: Yes, thank you and it's great to hear how the conversation and the interest is just growing very, very fast around your work and the findings that you've proven and proof that if you get good data and you get some evidence, you really get some traction going as well. I will put links to all the reports, including the Microsoft one that you mentioned in the show notes, and if people want to follow your work, what's the best way for them to do that?

Vijay: I'm very active on LinkedIn, so regular posts on LinkedIn but also on Twitter. So these are the two, two main handles I have. Yeah.

Helen: Okay, well keep watching this space listeners because it sounds like a fast evolving conversation and if your organization is stuck in endless meetings, there is definitely something you can do about it. And I hope you've found some really useful pieces of advice and insights from the conversation with Vijay.

Vijay, thank you so much for giving us your time to talk about your research, explain what it covered and how you approached it, and the absolutely fascinating findings that I'm sure will be instrumental over the coming months and year in helping organizations across different sectors to embrace more productive, more sustainable, more satisfying ways of working.

It's been a real pleasure to have you as a guest. Thank you very much.

Vijay: Thank you, Helen.