If you care about workplace culture like I do, you can’t hear rumors of a 4-hour meeting week and not get more than a little excited. That’s just one of the promises of “10X Culture: The 4-hour meeting week and 25 other secrets from innovative, fast-moving teams.” But is it possible? I talked to Darren Chait, coauthor of the book and cofounder of Hugo, to find out.
Darren Chait has a thing or two to share about collaboration and culture. His book came about in the most collaborative way possible: a Google Doc. Whenever his team tried something that worked well—or if someone shared a great idea—they threw it in the doc and slowly built a bible to building great team culture. He sat down with me to talk 10x culture, what it means, and how it can work across all aspects of your organization.
10X Organization
So, what’s the 10x organization all about? It’s moving towards something Chait calls a “networked organization.” Yes, it’s about having a remote workforce. But it’s also about having the ability to adapt and move with the changing times. There are two major benefits. Chait explains, “We’re able to hire more experienced talent, more cost effectively, so we can have more skills and more resources available to us than we could if everyone was in one place, such as San Francisco.” The other benefit that comes with that? Diversity of perspectives and experience. While Chait acknowledges it doesn’t come without challenges, he points to the tools they use to share information more widely. “We default to open—every document that’s created is available to everyone. Every meeting comes with meeting notes that everyone has access to.” The result is a culture of transparency, engagement and honesty, where everyone has all the inputs they need to see the problems and find the solutions.
10X Decision Making
Decision making is a huge part of a workplace culture—the 10x way is all about empowering people, streamlining the process and revisiting past decisions based on new info. At Hugo, Chait points to something they call a Decision Journal. When you make a decision, he explains, you note your decision, the rationale, the expected outcome and put a date to review it. This gives you a feedback loop that allows you to revisit the decision, see what’s working, what’s changed and what could be done differently. The 10X plus up? “We made a public central decision log for the whole team—we use Typeform, share them to Slack and we’ve created shared consciousness. Everyone now knows how everyone else thinks and how they make decisions, as well as knowing the things that are decided on every day.”
10X Meetings
So how does the 4-hour meeting week work? It all starts with rules for when to set up meetings. Chait points to the old way of setting up meetings whenever you want to share information. But why set up a meeting to update someone? “If I want to know the status of projects, I have project management tools, I have collaborative documents, I have dashboards, I have chat apps where I can go and in one second sync with 5,000 people around the world.” At Hugo, they redefined meetings as a forum for discussion, decision making and collaboration. Simple as that. If you’re not problem solving, discussing, deciding, then there’s no meeting required. Suddenly meetings became a lot more productive—and there was a lot less need for them. Workplace magic.
Want more? This is really, just the tip of the iceberg. You can find Darren Chait’s book, “10X Culture: The 4-Hour Meeting Week and 25 Other Secrets From Innovative, Fast-Moving Teams” here or find out more about Hugo, the company he cofounded, right here.
Listen to the interview with Darren Chait