It’s 4:33pm. Your last meeting of the day is running 3 minutes over and you’ve become suddenly aware of your chair’s lack of lumbar support. Your mind wanders to whether you have enough pasta for dinner tonight and a recruiter's unanswered email in your inbox. “Didn’t we cover this in last Friday’s seminar?” you wonder, as the meeting holder drones about the third of five pillars for some optimization framework. You try to recall if the recruiter’s email mentioned a $10k or $14k salary increase.
If you’ve opened this, there is a likelihood that you or your colleagues have endured a similar situation.
It’s no mystery that great companies are not built by people who hate working there.
A strong company culture unlocks an organization’s potential—but what unlocks company culture?
Our scientifically backed answer? Meetings. While a “strong meeting strategy” lacks the charm of a “four-day work-week” in a job description, they’re integral to employee satisfaction.
Meetings are the necessary building blocks of a workday, where creativity and collaboration thrive. Or flop. They have the power to inspire creative breakthroughs that shift the company or an angsty job-searching session at lunch.
We’re not being idealistic—meetings have to happen. They’re the most efficient way of bringing ideas together and creating cohesion. But not every meeting can come with a song, dance, and free lunch. However, what if we reframed meetings? What if every meeting became an opportunity to strengthen company culture?
Instead of seeing a meeting calendar invite as a necessary evil for information dissemination, what if we treated employees like end users and obsessed over their experience—the flow, the interface, the mental load we’re asking of them, and, most importantly, the value we add?
The reality is, that the most forward-thinking companies understand that meeting culture is company culture. And they approach every meeting as an opportunity to build it.
If you’re running poorly planned meetings, including unnecessary people, or letting them run late - you’re sending a message to your employees. You don’t care about their time. Poor meeting hygiene reflects a culture where employees’ time and effort are undervalued.
Revenues rise and fall, but time is an asset a company (and its people) never gets back.
When meetings are unstructured, exclusionary, or lack follow-through, it’s a clear sign that power dynamics are stalling progress. Research by Steven Rogelberg shows that leaders consistently rate their own meetings far more favourably than attendees do—a common blindness of most agenda-holders.
In their well-intentioned efforts to create coherence and collaboration, they instead breed resentment and exhaustion in their teams. The structure and openness of meetings reveal how transparent and accountable the company really is. When everyone has a chance to speak, feedback is welcomed, and decisions are clear, it sends a strong message: transparency and accountability matter here.
A group of people stuck in a room for an hour is the perfect breeding ground for either fresh ideas or status-quo thinking. When the agenda-setter opens the floor for creative risk-taking (or even holding space for bad ideas!), it signals that innovation and inclusivity matter. When your meetings are rigid and don’t leave room for mistakes - it’s a perfect recipe for innovation to stagnate and for disengaged employees to daydream about retirement.
The companies that will be thriving in 2027 are those with a solid company culture in 2024. So, if meetings are so critical to that culture, why aren’t we obsessing over them? Because planning, executing, and tracking a great meeting is hard. It requires a level of quantitative data guarded by a barricade of emotional intelligence.
Kairos has done the hard work of studying meetings.
Your employees don’t want a free lunch—they want a culture that makes them feel respected, engaged, and valuable. Every meeting is an opportunity to achieve that. Kairos isn’t just an investment in meeting performance; it’s an investment in company culture.
Stop offering free pizza.
Start offering great meetings.
Watch your culture flourish.
Ready to transform your culture? Book a demo with Kairos today.