Meetings Are Not The Enemy: Guide To Making Them Work For You

Why we meet

There is plenty written about meetings. Essentially I think it boils down to 4 reasons – to connect, to align, to debate and to decide.

I lead with to connect because humans are social creatures. We crave connection and to be understood. While I am a big fan of asynchronous work and love the advancements made in collaboration tools accelerated by the pandemic, I still think we need synchronous communication to build connections.

Alignment is crucial for productivity in any organization. When team members are aligned and have a clear understanding of the goals, priorities, and expectations they work more efficiently and effectively. No more time wasted on tasks that aren’t important or getting stuck on misaligned ideas. Meetings are an excellent way to achieve alignment. Taking the time to align and clarify, avoids so many problems. Ultimately, alignment helps a team do their best work and meetings are an essential tool for achieving this.

When coming together around a decision to be made it is important to be clear about whether the purpose of that meeting is to debate or decide. Are you in the process of collecting more data or points of view? Do you need to take action right away? You will save yourself a lot of frustration by stating upfront what the goal is and having everyone in the right mindset. Trying to wrangle a decision from people geared up for a debate is an exercise in frustration.

We meet for lots of reasons. To get the most out of your time and your team, be clear about your purpose.

Why Set Meeting Standards

In spite of their bad press, meetings are an essential aspect of any company’s operations. They enable teams to discuss, collaborate, and make decisions that move the business forward. However, without proper standards in place, meetings can easily become disorganized and unproductive. Eventually they devolve to the thing you have to survive rather than a tool in your operations tool box.

Establishing meeting standards is critical to ensuring that your team’s time is well-spent and that you get the most out of every meeting. Standards create patterns your team can depend on and support your culture.

Here are some to consider:

• Requiring all participants to turn on their cameras for remote or hybrid meetings. This can help increase engagement and foster a sense of connection among team members, even if they are not in the same physical location.
• Having an agenda for all meetings. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and that the discussion stays focused on the topics at hand.
• Having set meeting lengths. Make your default lengths 25 or 55 minutes – to allow for breaks between meetings. Consider increments of 15 minutes rather than 30.
• Limits on the number of attendees. You can adopt the Amazon rule that no meeting should have more attendees than you can feed with 2 pizzas. Whether or not you have a hard and fast rule being conscious of the attendee list will help.

By setting meeting standards, you create a more efficient, effective, and enjoyable working environment for your team. Expectations are known, communication is consistent, and time is spent intentionally.

How to evaluate your meetings

You want to reserve the time together for things best done synchronously – hashing out a debate, aligning on a decision, and making connections. Doing a regular audit of your meetings will keep calendars clear and conversations productive.
It is easy to forget why a recurring meeting got set up and just continue by default. Meetings have life cycles. What was a critical way to communicate or align around a priority can outlive its usefulness. As your company grows and changes, the attendees at a meeting may shift.

Couple of things to look out for:

• Is the agenda stale? Some agendas never change (eg: sprint meetings, retros) but most should be dynamic.
• Do others contribute agenda items or comments? If you are the only one participating do you need others to attend or can you share asynchronous updates
• Are you creating next steps? Great meetings have action before and after. If nothing happens after, maybe you did not need the meeting.
• Is everyone participating? Make sure you have the right people there. If someone is just barely showing up, maybe they do not need to be there.

All recurring meetings should be reviewed periodically. Does it serve a purpose? Does it need to evolve? Can it be shortened?