Ever left a meeting feeling more drained than before it started? That’s the dreaded meeting hangover. Brian Milner and Julie Chickering dive into why bad meetings have lasting effects—and what facilitators AND participants can do to make them better.

Overview

Bad meetings don’t just waste time, they drain energy, morale, and engagement long after they’re over.

In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian and Julie Chickering unpack the concept of "meeting hangovers"—the lingering negative effects of ineffective meetings. They explore why bad meetings happen, the shared responsibility of facilitators and participants, and practical strategies for turning the tide. From fostering accountability to knowing when to walk it off, this conversation will help you rethink how meetings impact team dynamics and productivity.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Julie Chickering

#137 Stop Wasting Time with Guests Kate Megaw

HBR The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers by Brent N. Reed, et al.

When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing by Daniel H. Pink

Remotely Productive by Alex Pukinskis

Working on a Scrum Team Class

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Julie Chickering is the brains and brawn behind JC Agile Consulting, believes that Lean and Agile practices are packed with potential — to enable positive culture change, business agility, and breakthrough results. Julie is a past president and board member of the Agile Project Management Network (APLN), a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), as well as a traditional Project Management Professional (PMP).

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00 )

Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always Brian Milner and haven't got to say this for a while. So I'm happy to say again, welcome back to the show, the fabulous Julie Chickering. Welcome back, Julie.

Julie (00:15 )

Thanks, Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Milner (00:17 )

Yeah, very excited to have Julie back. Julie is a friend of the show. We've had her on multiple times and it's been too long. We just need to have you on more often again. So thank you for making the time and coming back. We wanted to have Julie on sort of as a little bit of a continuation from our last episode that we had with Kate McGaw. You we talked a little bit about facilitation there and there was a lot that we talked about initially to set that up to talk about

Julie (00:30 )

Sure.

Brian Milner (00:44 )

just the fact that there's an epidemic of bad meetings. There's kind of a harmful thing happening where it's extremely prevalent that meetings are going poorly. There's not a lot of attention that's given to this. There's not a lot of focus in a lot of organizations because it's such a prevalent issue. of our meetings being so bad. And Julie pointed out to me this Harvard Business Review article that sort of became a touchstone, I think, for what we wanted to talk about. It's called the hidden toll of meeting hangovers. And we'll link to this in the show notes. But the idea behind the article was just to say, they quoted a stat early on saying that they did a study and found that more than a quarter, 28 % of meetings left employees with lingering negative effects, such as impaired engagement and productivity. And so that's what they were referring to this sort of this meeting hangover, that bad meetings take a toll beyond just the lost time in the meeting. And that's kind of what we were talking about more with Kate is, you know, yeah, we want to make our meetings better, but there is sort of this ongoing lingering that, you know, from my reading of this and what I've experienced, kind of compounds, you know? One bad meeting then can lead to another bad meeting and another one and that feeling of anxiety and disconnectedness and like I said here, impaired engagement and productivity, those kind of grow and get worse and worse the longer that you have these bad meetings. So Julie, I'll just start with you and say, you know, when you read this article, what was it? What was it that really stood out to you, that jumped out to you, that made you think this was an important kind of area of focus?

Julie (02:27 )

First of all, I love the title because I can relate to it. So when you're having a hangover, you just feel terrible, right? And this person that they talk about first, Jacob, about like, he was so frustrated when he left the meeting. So the introductory story when he was so frustrated when he left the meeting, he canceled his one-on-one right after because he knew he couldn't concentrate. And then he was just like so upset. for the rest of the day and talking about how he just didn't even want to work on the project anymore. So just this, I just got this physical sensation reading this around how it feels when you're in a meeting that's ineffective. And we've all been there and I could just like feel it in my body when I read this story. And I also feel like once you know what I, what an ineffective meeting feels like, the ineffective one is more noticeable and draining. yeah, so and then this this lingering effect of morale and just wasted, just wasted opportunity. And it feels like

Brian Milner (03:32 )

Yeah. Yeah.

Julie (03:47 )

in the corporate world, this is the norm. That we just have meeting after meeting after meeting that's just sucking the life force out of everyone. And then we wonder why nothing gets done.

Brian Milner (04:00 )

Yeah, I mean, this article is packed with statistics and it's tempting for me to just kind of read them all off to you. I'm not going to do that. But there's a couple of things that kind of jump out to me. they talk about how around half of people have this feeling of that as a result of the hangover from the meeting, that they have negative or harmful impacts on their interactions with coworkers. They feel more disconnected from their team. and they want to spend more time alone based on the fact that, I went through this really kind of, there's no other way to say it, traumatic experience of having this really harmful, bad meeting. they connect the dots by saying, people will leave these meetings and oftentimes they will then go commiserate with coworkers and say, share their frustrations, which is helpful, it's good. But it also, you know, they noted here, this can kind of spread some feeling of negativity or hopelessness, you know, that it's always going to be this way. You know, yeah, I had a meeting like that as well. Boy, I guess this place is doomed. It's always going to feel like this. And so they have this kind of ongoing, as I said, compounding almost nature of it that one bad thing leads to another leads to another leads to another. And pretty soon you've got this really harmful, negative work environment and it's not necessarily something that's just happened. It's just the repetition of going through those things lead to this ongoing negative psychological impact in the organization.

Julie (05:28 )

Yeah, I'm just smiling because I can just think of some meetings that I used to have a leader that would always show up late. Always show up late. We'd be halfway through the topic and then he would show up and we'd have to stop what we were doing and go circle back and just speed and you could just feel. the whole mood of the meeting change. We were actually making progress and we have to stop and we have to go all the way over. And this is constant. So what we would do afterwards is then have meetings after the meetings to complain about the leader doing that. The more adult thing would have been of course to say to the leader, when you do this,

Brian Milner (06:15 )

Yeah.

Julie (06:22 )

This is the outcome.

Brian Milner (06:25 )

Yeah. So, so that's kind of, you know, what we want to talk about a little bit in here as well is, in the last episode, we, focused a lot on facilitation and the idea that, Hey, there's a lot of responsibility to the meeting organizer, whoever's facilitating this to not have it be this negative kind of environment. And I don't disagree with any of that, that we talked about in the last episode. I think there is a lot of that, that is true, but I think it's, it's. important for p