It doesn’t matter where you work—bad meetings are a universal pain point. But they don’t have to be.

Rebecca Hinds is an organizational researcher who has spent the past 15 years helping teams fix their broken meetings—and broken collaboration in general. Hinds has applied her Stanford PhD to the future of work, founding think tanks at two technology companies, and is now the author of the forthcoming book, Your Best Meeting Ever: Seven Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done, out February 2026.

Hinds joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss how bad meetings can degrade your company’s culture, the purpose meetings should actually serve, and how to start treating meetings as your most valuable product—and not an inevitable headache.

Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Hold a “meeting doomsday” once a year—ancel every recurring meeting from employees’ calendars for 48 hours and then add meetings in a way that is effective and essential for the current state of business.
2. Get your communication system in order—Get everyone on the same page about where official communication takes place and what information they can rely on. This will help people evaluate when and whether a meeting should be called.
3. Use AI–When it comes to diagnosing dysfunction in meetings and creating equilibrium in contributions, AI can be your best friend.

• Rebecca Hinds’ website: https://www.rebeccahinds.com/
• Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings that Get Things Done: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Your-Best-Meeting-Ever/Rebecca-Hinds/9781668067482 (launching February 3, 2025)
• The Simple Sabotage Field Manual: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf
• Meeting Doomsday / Meeting Overload is a Fixable Problem (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2022/10/meeting-overload-is-a-fixable-problem
• The Collaboration Cleanse / Are Collaboration Tools Overwhelming Your Team (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2023/08/are-collaboration-tools-overwhelming-your-team
• The Hidden Toll of Meeting Hangovers (Harvard Business Review): https://hbr.org/2025/02/the-hidden-toll-of-meeting-hangovers

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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With the majority of our waking life spent at work, conversations around mental health are crucial for a healthy workplace culture. But how do you open the conversation at work? How can leaders build the trust and psychological safety needed for these conversations?

On this special episode, David Ko, CEO of the sleep and meditation app Calm and author of the book Recharge, shares his leadership journey from investment banking to purpose-driven leadership. Since 2022, he’s guided Calm’s work in over 190 countries, supporting millions of people seeking to improve their wellbeing.

Ko describes “the battery check,” a simple framework for starting conversations about mental health, describes how burnout happens when leaders don’t explain the “why” behind decisions, and shares some candid personal anecdotes.

The conversation is hosted by Professor Sameer Srivastava and led by UC Berkeley Haas students Avanika Lal and Esa Tilija, both MBA 26. The joint Dean’s Speaker Series and Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation event took place at the Haas School of Business on September 30, 2025.

1. Make mental health conversations accessible: Ask "How's your battery?" instead of "How's your mental health?" This simple reframing normalizes discussions that are otherwise difficult to start, creating psychological safety for your team.

2. Stop stacking, start subtracting: Burnout happens when leaders keep adding priorities without removing anything or explaining why. When assigning new work, identify what employees should stop doing. Help them understand the "why" to create shared purpose, not just more tasks.

3. Listen first, talk last: Be a "Chief Listening Officer" rather than the first voice in the room. Foster open dialogue where employees feel comfortable challenging ideas and speaking up.

Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

• Recharge: Boosting Your Mental Battery, One Conversation at a Time by David Ko
• The Recharge Podcast
• National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI)
• UC Berkeley Haas Dean’s Speaker Series

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Think your workplace runs on pure merit? Think again. In this season-opening episode, Berkeley Haas professor and leading sociologist Toby Stuart reveals how hidden status dynamics shape whose ideas get heard, who advances, and why meritocracies might be a “nice myth to think about” but nearly impossible to achieve in practice. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

Stuart, author of the new book Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner-Take-Most World, joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to explore how social status quietly drives decisions, what functions it serves in organizations and society, and how leaders can navigate—and reshape—these hidden hierarchies.

1. No matter how hard they’ve worked to get where they are, leaders should recognize that only part of their status was truly earned. Act with humility, acknowledge the roles that other people have played, and generously share pass along the status you hold.

• Anointed: The Extraordinary Effects of Social Status in a Winner Take Most World, By Toby Stuart
• "AI will bring back the old boys’ club", By Toby Stuart, Boston Globe/Haas News, July 27, 2025
• "Could AI Destroy the Value of an Elite Education?", By Toby Stuart, U.S. News, August 27, 2025“
• The Philosophical Bet We All Need to Make in the Age of AI”, by Toby Stuart, Time, Sept. 29, 2025
• "The Matthew Effect in Science,” By Robert Merton, Science, 1968
• “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of "Blind" Auditions on Female Musicians”, By Claudia Goldin, American Economic Review, 2004.

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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