When we look for opportunities for improvement, at some point every team will bring up “too many meetings” as one of their pain points, even though it’s frequently not the number of them that’s the actual problem.
When we dig into it, I find that the frustrations with meetings fall into one of three categories, and knowing which we have is the first step to fixing them.
- Number of meetings
- Efficiency of meetings
- When meetings are scheduled
Let’s look at each of these.
Number of meetings
Sometimes there really are too many and we want to reduce that number.
Law of mobility
In general, we should only be attending meetings if we’re either learning or contributing. Any meeting where we aren’t doing one of those two is a waste of our time. Open Space events have an explicit Law of Mobility that states that if we aren’t learning or contributing then we are expected to go somewhere else, and I encourage all teams to abide by this.
If you aren’t learning or contributing then leave the meeting. It’s your responsibility to make effective use of your time.
This seems obvious so why don’t we leave? The simple answer is social pressure. It feels rude to leave part way through a meeting, or we feel that we’d be judged if we did that. The easiest way to get past that social pressure is to establish team working agreements that specify what we’ll do if the meeting isn’t a good use of our time. It’s much easier to say “The team agreements say I that I should leave” rather than “I feel that I should leave”. Set up the conditions to make it easy to do the right thing.
This is surprisingly effective: “I don’t think you need me here anymore. If that changes, call me and I’ll come back.”
A related issue is that sometimes we attend a meeting because it sounds important but once we’re there, we realize that we’re really not needed. Again, use the law of mobility.
As the facilitator, I’ve often noticed people who are significantly distracted and told them “If there’s something else that’s more important for you to be doing right now, then you should leave and do that”. They’re frequently shocked that I would even give them the option of leaving, but honestly, they’re not getting anything out of my session when they’re like that, and they’re just distracting the rest of the meeting. Not only are they less efficient, they’re making others less efficient.
Too many people, or the wrong people invited
Sometimes we get vaguely worded meeting invites and we attend only because it’s not clear if we should be there, and fear the social pressure of getting it wrong.
I worked once with a team that was getting many of these kinds of requests. They decided as a group to decline any meeting that didn’t clearly explain what the purpose was and why they were needed. Whenever they declined a meeting, they would paste in a quick explanation of that policy and very quickly, they found they stopped being invited to meetings that weren’t relevant. Establishing that quick policy, make a real difference, very quickly.
“Could this have been an email?”
Sometimes meetings are called just to disseminate information. Always ask “could this have been an email?” and if the answer is yes then we have an opportunity to remove yet more meetings.
Recognize that there’s an intention behind every meeting. There may be a different way to satisfy that intention without a structured meeting. For example, the daily standup is all about coordination. Teams that are using mob/ensemble programming are never out of sync so they don’t need a formal meeting to collaborate.
At the opposite end, there are times that we spend too much time on email or in a chat application when having an actual meeting would have been a better use of everyone’s time. The goal here isn’t to eliminate meetings, it’s to eliminate waste. Sometimes having that meeting is actually the better use of time.
Hero culture
Occasionally, we get a case where you feel that you have to attend every meeting because everything really does depend on you and if you’re not there, nothing gets done. In that case, you’re a Hero, and that’s a bad thing. Take steps to fix that before you burn out, or the rest of the team loses all motivation.
Did this add value?
Lastly, some meetings are by very definition a waste of time. We’re having a meeting to satisfy some part of our process that doesn’t add any value? Let’s change our process to eliminate that. As Peter Drucker says “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
Efficiency of meetings
Often it’s not the frequency that’s the problem, but rather how ineffective they happen to be.
Time
Assuming that the meeting really does have some value and that you need to be here for the discussion, we need to look at the effectiveness. Some meetings are so poorly facilitated that we take two hours for something that could have been done in twenty minutes.
The daily coordination meeting (often called standup or daily scrum) is a perfect example of this. I’ve seen teams take a full hour to run one of these because the conversation rambles all over the place. I’ve also seen tightly focused ones that averaged less than five minutes per day, for teams as big as twenty people. See improving your standup.
Preparation
First we should consider whether we have everything we need. If people were supposed to come prepared, did they? Are all the key people present? Are we able to come to decisions?
If we’re missing key elements then perhaps we should just reschedule. All too often a key person is missing so it doesn’t matter what we discuss because we can’t move forward without that person. Reschedule when they’re available.
Facilitation
Is the meeting rambling off topic? Some groups have a tendency to get easily sidetracked by conversations that are unrelated to the topic at hand. A strong facilitator will help keep the conversation on topic. We need to normalize calling out that behaviour.
A strong facilitator makes all the difference here. Facilitation is a set of skills that is different from the other things we do. It’s worth investing in our people to develop strong facilitation skills.
Focus
Is there a lack of focus? We often see people show up in a meeting but then spend all their time doing something else on their laptop. If you’re not paying attention, why are you there? You’re not adding value. See the law of mobility again.
When meetings are scheduled
Lastly, the problem with meetings is when they’re scheduled.
People doing creative work, which is just about all knowledge work, need large blocks of uninterrupted time. If we schedule a short meeting in the middle of the morning and another in the middle of the afternoon, we’ll get almost nothing done all day.
Conversely, if we scheduled those two meetings back to back at either the beginning or end of the day then the rest of the day would be one large block of time and we’d be able to get good productive work done.
Most teams have some kind of a standup/coordination meeting once a day. If we have to discuss another topic then doing it right after standup is an ideal time. We’re already interrupted so it’s not disrupting anything else.
Many teams will block off time on the calendar for that focused time. No meetings in the afternoons or no meetings on Fridays. They’ll push as many meetings as possible into contiguous chunks so that when they are back doing their creative work, they have the time to really focus on that.
Conclusion
It’s up to you to manage your time effectively. If the current meetings are getting in the way of doing your work then fix the meetings.