For so many founders the real work begins after everybody goes home, late at night and after all of the day’s meetings have run their course. Meanwhile team members who’ve gone home are likely looking back at their day with a mix of frustration and satisfaction: frustration because they spent so much of their time in meetings, satisfaction because meetings still count as work and progress.
More meetings is the natural result as a company grows. They offer a space for productive discussion, disseminating information and making decisions. Plus, they’re so simple to set up. You just add one to the calendar, make it recurring and presto, productivity is secured for however long the meeting recurs.
But ask any team in your organisation how they could be more productive, and their answer will most definitely not be, “we need more meetings”. The answer is likely not to add more automation either. While it’s become the focus of companies to look at where they can cut costs by bringing in AI, it’s usually not a lack of automation that’s holding teams back. It’s being overloaded with responsibilities, having to achieve unrealistic goals and spending time in meetings. It’s easier to throw AI into the mix than to ask a simple question: “Is this meeting really necessary?”
Meetings are useful, and sometimes there’s no substitute for a face-to-face conversation. Some news is best shared in person, and some discussions can be more productive when folk are able to look at and react to one another; difficult conversations work much better in a one-on-one setting than over a chat or email.
But they don’t work for everything. Because it’s so much easier to say “let’s have a meeting” and put something in the calendar, that’s what people default to. Even more so when there’s no requirement to state what the meeting is about and what the desired outcome is.
How to fix your meetings culture
Meetings are great for starting something new as well as bringing something to an end. Everything in between is either updates or decisions that can be made using a different medium.
For meetings to be productive preparation is key. Without setting up attendees with everything they need to have a productive discussion and make a decision in a meeting, lots of time will go into setting everyone up in the beginning. Endless discussion will ensue without a clear end in sight.
Changes to your meeting culture need to come from the top. Bosses need to show that they value productive meetings and that they’re ready to nip anything in the bud that doesn’t meet a set of criteria. These criteria can be set together with the entire team, but they should be made explicit.
No meetings without an agenda and a purpose
When there’s no purpose and clear agenda to a meeting, it becomes a meandering mess that will take up all the time it’s been allotted without yielding much other than conversation. Purpose and agenda require preparation and sending any supporting materials out upfront so that people can prepare. The better the preparation, the more effective the meeting.
Meeting ground rules
You need a set of ground rules around meetings. A purpose, goals and an agenda are non-negotiable if you don’t want your meetings to be a mess. But it doesn’t have to stop there. Ground rules can include how roles are distributed (who’s the facilitator? who’s the notetaker?), where status updates should happen and that it’s okay to skip a meeting if none of the requirements are fulfilled or if there’s simply nothing to talk about.
Limit recurrences and review meetings
It’s become fashionable in some companies to clear out everyone’s calendar at the beginning of the year or quarter and start from scratch. Other companies have adopted no-meeting days to give their teams time to focus. There’s a simpler way to rein in meetings: rather than setting them up with an extended or unlimited recurrence, set them to expire after three months.
Limiting recurrences has the added benefit of forcing a conversation around each meeting. Is this still a productive use of our time? Does the format need to change? Are the right people still present or are we missing more diverse perspectives? Can we drop this meeting or replace it with something new? That discussion should be a part of the agenda whenever the meeting’s recurrence is about to end.
Make it okay to say no
Not everyone who’s invited to a meeting has anything to add to it. Lists of participants are usually much bigger than they need to be and yet folk will still show up. They may not feel like they have much of a choice, in particular when the meeting either involves or is scheduled by the boss. Those very same bosses are invited to all kinds of meetings themselves, where they also may not have anything to add. As the organiser, the easiest thing you can do to avoid getting a negative response from folks is to check with them before the meeting. Let them know why you think they should be there and get confirmation upfront.
Give everyone a voice
The key to a good meeting is that everyone present has an opportunity to share their perspectives. So when one or two people hog the conversation, you’re depriving your business of the best solution available. Make it okay for the facilitator to limit the time anyone can speak and instead give other people the floor, including the boss.
This meeting could’ve been a…
This meeting could’ve been anything other than a meeting. It could’ve been shorter (nobody will ever be mad about ending a meeting early). It could’ve been a document. It could’ve been a decision made asynchronously. It could’ve been a status update in the team’s or organisation’s internal communications platform. It could’ve been focus time. The old adage that a meeting could’ve been an email still bears a lot of truth. When used in a productive rather than cynical form, simply asking the question of whether a meeting is really necessary and if it could happen in some other format instead is still incredibly powerful.
Pull a Mathias
I don’t fancy having things named after me, but pulling a Mathias is what you can do when a meeting has no clear purpose or nothing on the agenda. If either is the case, you cancel it.
Meetings are where most of the time is spent in most organisations. And yet so little time is spent on making them better, ironically because there are just so many of them there’s no time for anything else. Cutting useless meetings and making the most out of the ones you really need to have are the simplest and easiest ways to give your team more time to focus on building products.
Introducing a better meeting culture at your startup can start with a simple set of questions posed to your team: Which meetings do you find useful? Which are a waste of time? Why? How can we make them better?
The best time to start having better meetings was years ago. The next best time is today.
