From one workshop to a culture shift: how University of Bristol’s Global Engagement Division is rebuilding its meetings culture
Sector: Higher Education
Services delivered: Fixing Meetings · The Productivity Ninja’s Meetings Survival Guide · Mastering Microsoft Teams Meetings · Impact Clinic
Why the University of Bristol came to us
Sandra Jackson, Director of Strategy and Operations for the Global Engagement Division, didn’t come to us with a single session in mind. She came with a division of 150 people spending, in her words, “an awful lot of time in an awful lot of meetings,” structures that had grown organically over three years of expansion, with no one ever deciding that’s how they should look.
The timing added pressure. The division was mid-restructure, roles were shifting, and headspace was already stretched before anyone added another meeting to the calendar.
Sandra’s ask was specific: could Fixing Meetings work not just for a single team, but be rolled out across a group this size, with guidance on how to make it stick. That question shaped everything that followed.
What we did
This wasn’t a single workshop. It was a programme, built around the division’s actual shape and constraints.
- Fixing Meetings, in person, for 20 leaders and key academic stakeholders (14th May)
- The Productivity Ninja’s Meetings Survival Guide, delivered online as two keynote sessions to reach the wider division of around 150 people (21st May and 3rd June)
- Mastering Microsoft Teams Meetings, online, addressing the practical mechanics of hybrid meeting hygiene (24th June)
- An Impact Clinic for the leaders group, built specifically to troubleshoot what had and hadn’t stuck since the first session (18th June)
- A bespoke four week email campaign, written by Think Productive, giving the whole division weekly nudges, permission-giving language, and reminders that better meetings are everyone’s responsibility, not just the chair’s
Each session fed the next. Hayley Watts, who led the Fixing Meetings and keynote sessions, used the leaders’ session to start collecting the division’s own ideas for a meetings manifesto rather than handing one down. Deane Marwa’s Teams session picked up a thread that had already surfaced by then: the practical gap between wanting better meetings and knowing how to run them well in Teams, particularly around capturing and tracking actions.
Turning insight into ownership: the manifesto
The manifesto is the anchor of this programme, and its strength is that it isn’t Think Productive’s. It’s the division’s own thinking, organised.
During the Fixing Meetings session, four groups worked independently to generate ideas for what better meetings should look like, then voted on them with sticker dots. Sixteen distinct ideas came out of that exercise. The same consensus kept surfacing across every group:
- No purpose, no meeting. If the reason for a meeting isn’t clear, ask before accepting.
- Shorter by default. 20 or 45 minutes instead of 30 or 60, building breathing space back into the day.
- Invite like you mean it. Only invite people with a clear role: decide, advise, contribute, learn, or act.
- Actions beat attendance. What matters is what changed, not who was in the room.
Staff were tired of meetings, but they still wanted connection with colleagues. The manifesto isn’t anti-meeting. It’s pro-purpose.
That thinking became a shared, designed manifesto poster, split into principles for meeting planners and for participants, given to the whole division. It closes with a line that captures the whole philosophy: “The aim is not fewer conversations. It is better conversations, with more space around them.”
In their words
Straight after the Fixing Meetings session on 14th May, while the conversation was still fresh, we asked a couple of leaders for their honest reaction. Here’s what they told us:
Andrew Monk, Executive Director of Global Engagement, University of Bristol
On the value of the session itself:
“It’s just really good to actually take some time out. We talk about being absolutely chock-a-block with meetings, and you never actually talk about the concept of a meeting, you just talk about the content in a meeting. So to have that breathing space to actually think about what we actually want to get out of it, how we want it to feel to work, how much of our time is spent in that way, and being more deliberate about that, that’s the conversation that we were able to have today.”
On the division’s biggest challenge, and why meetings still matter for a dispersed team:
“We’re a quite large division, 170 people, but we’re working in an organisation of 8,500 people, so it’s not just about what we do within our own division. But for us, people want to feel connected. We’re a division that’s actually very dispersed, people spend a lot of time out of the office, across the UK and other international territories, and meetings are a way of feeling connected back to your home team. It’s making sure you’re deliberate about the connection, but specific about the purpose of a meeting.”
Sandra Jackson, Director of Strategy and Operations, University of Bristol
On her honest reaction to the session:
“It’s been really helpful. It’s really interesting to think about meetings from a different angle and a different perspective, and have some space to consider how you’re using them, rather than just racing through them in a day-to-day busy workload.”
On the biggest challenge the division faces:
“I think it’s a combination of overload, so too many, and also of lack of structure in specific meetings, not being entirely clear about why people are in the room, or what we’re trying to achieve, or what the agenda is for that day.”
On what a better meetings culture would unlock:
“Space to feel more productive, and feel like there is time to think and to get more done.”
What participants are saying
It wasn’t only the leaders who noticed a shift. Across the three workshops delivered so far to the wider division, feedback has been consistently strong:
- 91% rated their consultant 4 or 5 out of 5, across Fixing Meetings, the Meetings Survival Guide keynote, and Mastering Microsoft Teams Meetings
- 81% rated the sessions themselves 4 or 5 out of 5
- Participants described genuinely practical takeaways, not just ideas to file away:
“I’m going to be much more considered about the meetings I schedule, the meetings I accept, and the culture around meetings that we create. I’m also going to think carefully about timings, and try to shorten the meetings I schedule.”
“Ask for agenda, reject meetings without clear purpose, allow interactions during the meeting.”
“I’m now aware of all the options, will definitely investigate apps and use the agenda a bit more, and encourage others to.”
The changes people described weren’t dramatic reinventions. They were small, specific, and repeated across dozens of responses: shorter meetings, clearer agendas, more willingness to say no. That’s exactly the kind of change the manifesto was built to encourage.
Early signals of change
The programme hasn’t concluded yet, but the Impact Clinic, held with the leaders group after the main sessions, surfaced real, specific reflections on what had already started to shift, in their own words:
- The programme was being “taken seriously”, described as a real motivator rather than training that “fizzles out”
- It wasn’t seen as a one-off. It was creating space for “continuing the work” over time
- There was a growing sense of optimism, of being “hopeful” about the change underway
- Meetings culture work was starting to be understood not as training, but as “how we work”
- Confidence was building in the group’s ability to carry the change forward themselves
Sandra, reflecting on what success looks like, was clear that it didn’t need to be dramatic. Even a handful of small individual changes counted. That framing matters, because it’s already showing up in the data: on the mid-point pulse survey, leaders reported feeling more confident and empowered to put better meetings into practice, both as chairs and as participants, and specific practical shifts were already being named, like changes to how one working group tracks its actions.
What’s next
This programme is still underway. Real culture change doesn’t happen in a single workshop, it happens in the weeks and months after, when people decide whether new habits are worth keeping.
Here’s where things stand. The manifesto is being rolled out across the division’s existing working groups, Staff Experience, Learning & Development, and Culture & Inclusion, so it reaches people who never sat in a session, not just those who did. The launch is being timed deliberately alongside the division’s restructure, when new teams are forming and old habits are already being reset.
A full post-programme survey is planned for a few months down the line, giving people time to actually embed what they’ve learned before being asked what’s changed. A longer-term follow-up will show what’s genuinely stuck, not just what felt good in the room on the day.
We’ll be updating this case study as that data comes in.