Meetings that Matter: Three Steps To Effective Meetings
Here’s how managers can improve team productivity and morale with the right meeting mindset.
Historically, the daily ‘standup’ call exists as a morning time-boxed event for teams to plan the day ahead. However, a new study from Coda found that almost 70% of respondents are “morning people” when it comes to productivity, claiming they do their best-focused work during this time. How do these two elements co-exist? Oliver Heckmann of Coda outlines three ways managers can improve team productivity and morale by shifting the meeting mindset to suit focus needs.
Every publication seems to have a study on the efficacy of team meetings. Over the past three years, what is now largely known as the beginning of 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 in the pre-COVID era, shifting meetings to an entirely virtual setting has seen some pitfalls for productivity and team morale. Even more, teams who have attempted to maintain the same cadence and purpose of meetings as they did in person have seen pushback.
As leaders, it’s time for us to transform how we think about meetings- no longer thinking of them as a necessity and thinking harder about 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. Let’s unpack the current structure of team meetings and establish how to improve them.
1. Do Not Have Your Morning Standup 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 morning focus time. Allow employees to start a day productively, whether 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 get the most out of your meetings, managers and team leads need to source productivity information like this to find out how employees best collaborate. Is the team distributed across time zones? How varied in age and family situation are they – even when working from home, kids’ drop-off at school is, for example, hard limits to when productive time can start for some. As managers, we strive to build diverse teams (for many good reasons) but a natural consequence of that diversity is that the team will have different working habits and start their productive time at different times in the morning.
I often see teams compromise on a standup time in the morning that works for everyone in the calendar but 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 change that pulls people out of their focus time. In my experience working with knowledge workers like engineers, operations, design and so on, people need about 20 minutes to get back into their previous flow. That means a 30min meeting costs closer to 50min of focused time.
What are better alternatives? I would recommend an open discussion in the team, not about the schedule of a standup or team meeting but focused on maximizing and protecting everyone’s most productive time.
If you are doing daily standups, you could, for example, have only a single weekly meeting and then do daily reports on tasks asynchronously or reschedule the standup to the afternoon. I am personally a big fan of asynchronous status updates, as they are the most flexible mechanism. This involves collecting task updates or snippets in an interactive document rather than a meeting. Aim to understand when a meeting is useful versus unnecessary but don’t assume – the overwhelming majority of survey respondents (80%) still prefer to brainstorm in a meeting, whether in-person or virtual.
2. Cluster Meetings and Create Regular Interruption-free Time
While protecting productive morning time is the most critical, the principle can be applied to the rest of the week as well. Much attention is typically paid to the time spent in meetings, and not enough attention to 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. If the meetings are clustered together, they cover only that time period and allow additional 2.5 hours of deeply focused work before they start.
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 (e.g., no meeting Wednesday) or a regular low-meeting week where 80% of meetings are canceled. I have had a very good experience with both.
3. Run Them Well
According to a study from Zippia, 71% of meetings were considered unproductive. This feedback can be for a number of reasons- Coda’s survey reported that the three biggest reasons employees deem a meeting ‘unproductive’ is because of too much time spent on unimportant topics, a lack of clarity on the next steps or decisions, and too few resources/agendas shared beforehand.
Before worrying about when to schedule a meeting, it is crucial to ensure that your meetings exist with good reason and run well. 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, e.g., in the title of the meeting.
Create a proper agenda that is shared. Ensure the right people are invited – it typically helps to be clear on who is critically needed and who is nice to have. Depending on how your team works, if there is pre-reading or other prep work, have it shared at least a day ahead of time. Ensure good notes are taken, and a summary that is clear on decisions, action items, and follow-up deadlines is sent afterward. End once you’ve aligned on the next steps and action items, even if that is before the scheduled end time in the calendar.
Footnote: The good news is that advances in AI make this easier and easier – meetings can be automatically transcribed and summarized, for example.
See More: Multimodality: A Must for Effective Human-AI Collaboration
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, often-asynchronous work, aligning teams on priorities and playing to all employees’ strengths and focus times can be challenging.
As a leader, you need not only obsess about which meetings are required and ensure they are run well – you need to equally obsess about the deep focus time of your knowledge workers and protect large enough time slots from interruptions, e.g., from meetings.
What steps have you taken to ensure more effective meetings? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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