- Everyone agrees that traditional meetings are broken, so some CEOs are shaking things up. Jensen Huang avoids one-on-ones entirely, Brian Chesky warns they can turn into therapy sessions, and Jamie Dimon calls distracted behavior “disrespectful.” Meanwhile Jeff Bezos embraces the chaos, insisting the messier the meeting the better.
Meetings: the corporate ritual everyone loves to hate.
They’re accused of blocking productivity and no longer living up to the generations-long belief in their role as essential drivers of collaboration and innovation.
About 72% of the time meetings are ineffective, according to a 2024 Atlassian study which surveyed 5,000 workers across four continents. The report found that work meetings are backfiring spectacularly: nearly 80% of people say they’re drowning in so many catch-ups, they barely have time to get any real work done.
“They’re not evil, they’re just poorly done,” the report notes.
Around 51% said that they have to work overtime throughout the week to make up for the time they wasted talking about the work. Because of this, many workers report feeling drained on days that they have meetings—and a majority say they’d feel more productive if they spent less time in meetings.
Gen Z workers are so fed up with meetings that they’re even taking to TikTok to complain, with “This could have been an email” exploding on social media.
“There’s nothing that pisses me off more than when I get a dumb call put on my calendar,” one Tiktoker @Quinn Valentine said in a video posted to her account.
“If you’re going to make this be a meeting, let’s make this the most productive couple of minutes that it needs to be, because that’s all it needs to be. If it could have been an email, this call should be 5, 10 minutes tops,” she added.
Workers aren’t the only ones fed up with pointless meetings—even CEOs aren’t happy with how they’re run. So they’re switching things up. As bosses increase their focus on in-office productivity, Fortune 500 CEOs from JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon to Nvidia’s Jensen Huang are coming up with unique ways to make meetings useful again.
Jamie Dimon
In his annual letter to shareholders published on Monday, the $279 billion bank CEO addressed the issue of employee engagement during meetings, emphasizing the importance of undivided attention and respect.
He observed that staffers were often distracted by notifications, personal texts, or emails during meetings. Whether by a buzzing phone or a wandering gaze, Dimon labeled such behavior as “disrespectful” and a “waste of time.”
Calling out this counterproductive meeting etiquette, Dimon urged employees to “make meetings count” by fully focusing on the discussions at hand. He underscored his personal commitment to this approach, stating that he always gives meetings his complete attention.
“Don’t read the same email two or three times. Most can be addressed immediately. And while this all sounds serious, make work fun. We spend the vast majority of our waking hours at work — it’s our job to try to make it fun and fulfilling,” Dimon wrote. “And another important one: Take care of yourself. If you don’t take care of yourself, it doesn’t work.”
Jensen Huang
Nvidia CEO and co-founder Huang adopts a unique leadership style that emphasizes organizational efficiency and autonomy. Rather than holding routine one-on-one meetings, he manages his 60 direct reports through group interactions and open communication channels.
“I don’t do one-on-ones with any of them, unless they need me. Then I’ll drop everything for them,” Huang said in a 2024 Keynote address at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research Summit. “I don’t write reviews for any of them. I give them constant reviews, and they provide the same to me.”
He has also expressed concerns that frequent meetings congest his schedule and impede his team’s efficiency.
“They never hear me say something to them, that is only for them to know,” Huang said. “Our company was designed for agility, for information to flow as quickly as possible, and for people to be empowered by what they are able to do, not what they know.”
Brian Chesky
Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO told Fortune last year that one-on-one meetings don’t work because they end up more like therapy sessions.
“The one-on-one model is flawed. It’s a recurring one-hour one-on-one meeting where the employee owns the agenda,” Chesky said. “What happens is that [staffers] often don’t talk about the things you want to talk about, and you become like their therapist.”
Chesky argued that these kinds of meetings often isolate discussions and prevent the whole team from benefiting equally; these private sessions miss out on collective brainstorming, shared learning, and open feedback.
“Almost every company has too many people, and they are afraid in the name of being inclusive to uninvite people, but that’s not what inclusion is,” Chesky said. “That’s a slippery slope. You need as few people in a meeting, not as many people.”
In lieu of one-on-ones, Chesky opted for quick check‑ins via call or text to stay connected to his team. The CEO reserves face‑to‑face time only for conversations that truly require confidentiality.
Jeff Bezos
Amazon founder and billionaire Bezos likes his meetings to be chaotic.
Last year Bezos shared how he boosts productivity levels in his meetings at the 2024 New York Times DealBook Summit. The leader said he only wanted “crisp documents” and “messy meetings” that wandered. He encourages the “ugly bits” of decision-making to be shown—getting to the crux of controversy is what breeds the best results.
“I’m very skeptical if the meetings are not messy,” Bezos said at the event.
He went on to tell a story that he once caught employees “rehearsing” a meeting, and called them out on it.
“I was like, don’t do that again. You don’t need to,” Bezos said. “Maybe you want to have all your ducks in a row and you want to put your best foot forward. But internally, you’re seeking truth, not a pitch. I don’t want to be pitched.”
Bezos says employees should aim to arrive early to the “sausage‑making” phase—otherwise, decisions can be finalized before they’ve had a chance to weigh in.
“You don’t want the whole thing to be figured out and then presented to you,” Bezos added.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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