Meetings that Matter: Three Steps To Effective Meetings
Many teams start the day with a meeting to set the day up for success. At the same time, most people are more productive in the morning. Is this the smartest way to ensure your employees are starting the day effectively?
Historically, the daily ‘standup’ call exists as a morning time-boxed event for teams to plan the day ahead. Yet, the Sleep Foundation says that 70% of people are either “Lion” or “Bear” chronotypes, who are most productive in the morning through early afternoon. Can this really lead to effective meetings or productive deep work? Oliver Heckmann of Coda outlines three ways managers can improve team productivity and morale by shifting the meeting mindset to suit focus needs.
There are myriad studies on the efficacy of team meetings. In the remote-work era, meetings have become a slew of sharing screens, talking when you’re actually on mute, and wondering if the meeting could have been an email or a Slack thread. While meetings weren’t necessarily guaranteed to be productive before Zoom, shifting meetings to an entirely virtual setting has created pitfalls for productivity and team morale. Teams attempting to maintain the same cadence and purpose of meetings as they did in person have seen pushback.
As leaders, it’s time to transform our thoughts about meetings. We shouldn’t consider them a necessity and should spend more time evaluating their timing and purpose. Some meetings should be replaced with asynchronous methods or transformed to improve team productivity and morale based on the specific needs of a team.
Effective Meeting Tip 1: Do Not Kill Your Team’s Productivity
In a 2022 general-population survey of over 1,000 full-time American employees, Coda found that 69% of respondents have their most focused work time in the morning. This isn’t entirely new information – there are a number of studies that have found that early risers are more productive. They’re also more likely to anticipate problems and minimize them efficiently, which leads to more success, especially in the business world. In a world of information overload, most people have their most productive time in the morning before they seemingly inevitably get pulled into a reactive mode dealing with meetings, slack, and email.
With this in mind, it should be in everyone’s best interest to respect the ritual of focus time. Allow employees to start their days productively, whether it’s by dealing with the hardest, most pressing, or even most energizing task.
While you may find a morning standup to be necessary to align on a day’s priorities, it’s important to know whether or not your team agrees, decide if this has to happen in the morning vs. late in the day, or if it even has to happen in the form of a meeting at all.
To improve participation and ensure effective meetings, managers and team leads need to understand how your employees best collaborate:
- Is the team distributed across time zones?
- How varied in age and family situation are they?
- Are there hard limits to when their productive time can start?
As managers, we strive to build diverse teams for many good reasons. At the same time, a natural consequence of diversity is that everyone will have different working habits and be productive time at different times.
Sometime, teams compromise on a standup time in the morning that works from a scheduling perspective. Yet, it inevitably interrupts the productive focus time of a large percentage of the team. And it can be very hard for employees to push back on those – or even to realize how disruptive even a very short meeting is.
Even a 5-minute meeting (and to be honest, no meeting is only 5 minutes) is a context switch that pulls people out of their focus time. Knowledge workers in jobs like engineering, operations, design and more, need about 20 minutes to get back into their previous flow. That means a 30 minute meeting costs closer to 50 minutes of focused time.
What are better alternatives? Try an open discussion with the team, but the agenda shouldn’t be about the schedule of a standup or team meeting, Instead, focus on how to maximize and protect everyone’s most productive time. For example, you could have a single weekly meeting and then do daily reports on tasks asynchronously. Asynchronous status updates are the most flexible mechanism. To make it work, you collect updates in an interactive document. Aim to understand when a meeting is useful versus unnecessary. At the same time, you shouldn’t assume the answer. The overwhelming majority of survey respondents (80%) still prefer to brainstorm in a meeting, whether in-person or virtual.
Another option is to reschedule your daily standups to the afternoon or end of the day.
Effective Meeting Tip 2: Cluster Meetings and Create Interruption-Free Time
People often focus on the time spent in meetings. Still, they tend to overlook the actual cadence of how those meetings are scheduled. It makes a difference if you have four 30-minute meetings, each one hour apart or clustered together with a break between the first and second hour. In the first case, the meetings cover a period of 5 hours and (assuming 20 minutes to get back into a highly focused state) prevent any deeper focused work longer than 40 minutes in that time. When you schedule meetings in cluster, they cover only that time period, allowing an additional two and a half hours for deeply focused work.
I like to capture both the total time spent in meetings as well as the longest period per day and per week with no meetings during typical working hours when I help people and teams optimize their productivity. Related to that, an easy exercise to run with a team is a meeting audit that uncovers these cadence problems and helps fix them.
I am also a big fan of having meeting-free time enforced top-down in a company, with leadership participating and leading by example. This can be in the form of a no-meeting day every week, like a “no meeting Wednesday.” Or you could implement a regular low-meeting week where 80% of meetings are canceled. I have had a very good experience with both.
Effective Meeting Tip 3: Run Them Well
According to a study published in the Harvard Business Review, 71% of meetings were considered unproductive. This feedback can be for a number of reasons. Coda’s survey found the top three reasons to deem a meeting ‘unproductive’ are: 1) too much time spent on unimportant topics, 2) a lack of clarity on the next steps or decisions, and 3) too few resources/agendas shared beforehand.
Before worrying about when to schedule a meeting, you should ensure that your meetings exist for a good reason. Don’t just keep a recurring meeting on the calendar for the sake of connecting. You need to put in the work to prepare for it. What is the intention? Decision making? Information sharing? Brainstorming? Make that very clear in the title of the meeting.
The creator of the meeting should:
- Create and share a clear agenda.
- Invite the right people. Be clear on who is critical, and who is optional.
- Share all pre-reading or other prep work at least a day ahead of time.
- Ensure someone takes good notes.
- Send a clear summary of decisions, action items, and follow-up deadlines afterward.
- Finally, end the meeting once you’ve determined next steps and action items. There’s no reason to draw out the meeting until the scheduled end time.
Could That Have Been an Email?
Even though some meetings are a misuse of time, by no means does that logic apply to all meetings. In an era of distributed, asynchronous work, teams face challenges. Aligning priorities can be difficult. Additionally, teams struggle to leverage each employee’s strengths. It’s also important to consider each individual’s focus times.
As a leader, you should focus on which meetings are necessary. Ensure that you (or your team) conduct those meetings effectively. Equally important is protecting the deep focus time of your knowledge workers. This means safeguarding large time slots from interruptions. Meetings can be one of those interruptions.
MORE ON EFFECTIVE MEETINGS
