I work as an Engineering Manager at Google, and my teams practice a simple habit – we book all meetings to start at five minutes past the hour (or half hour).
This works better than trying to finish five minutes early. Meetings often don’t finish on time, and the impact is highest with back-to-back meetings. If you try to end at 1:55pm, you will likely talk until 2:00pm anyway, which then runs into the next meeting. But shifting the start time usually guarantees a break. Why? Because there is strong social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour when that is the official end-time. The same social pressure applies to meetings that end at the half-hour.
That short break changes the tone of a meeting. It takes a minute or two to move between events, even online. When people arrive at 1:05pm, they are settled and less stressed. You might fear that people will start arriving at 1:07pm, but I have seen the opposite. They respect the new time. They arrive by 1:05pm, ready to work.
Do we lose five minutes in every meeting? In theory, yes. But meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change.
On balance, it is a win. The best proof is that the entire org does it now (the org didn’t copy my team — it just started organically), even though it is not mandatory. Like good code, a good team is built on small, sane details. Giving people five minutes to clear their heads, between back-to-back meetings, is a detail that works.
Try it — you’ll see it improves your day.
We previously ran meetings at Cruise this way. The reason it died: Google Calendar never offered this as a default meeting setting!
Ironic!