Managing Meetings Thoughtfully & Improving Workflow for Your Team

What causes “good enough” work to happen instead of quality work? For me, this usually occurs when I’m rushing because of either too much work or too many interruptions. While working at an agency I asked team members to reflect on what was getting in their way of larger thinking and fulfilling work, unsurprisingly, “meetings” were consistently mentioned. Meetings are a chance to connect and collaborate, but they also can make us feel exhausted and contribute to burnout and dissociation. Hearing the team loud and clear, I set out in 2021 to address the negative impact our current meeting structure was having on productivity and morale. I found some references that resonated with me that I’ve listed at the end of this (lots of smart people have written about this subject) and created my own approach and takeaways on how to cut down on meetings in a strategic way.

I was working at a remote agency, MKG, so most of our client interactions and a lot of our team interactions were meetings. As our agency grew, our meetings also grew in size and frequency. Sprinkle some global pandemic in the mix and meetings ballooned as our personal in-person social interactions dwindled and we relied more on work to connect with people. There were good things that came from our team coming together and spending time supporting each other and collaborating for sure, but workdays started to feel draining and task-focused based on time limitations rather than strategic and fulfilling.

Meetings should serve a purpose and not be a default

Too often meetings are the default for making decisions or getting things done as a group. Often an inclusive company culture will default to an approach of including anyone in the meeting that’s touching the project. A benefit of that is everyone is on equal footing and it avoids a game of telephone afterward. But only using this approach ignores all of the async tools that we now have to collaborate and share information, such as asana, zoom chat, loom, and google docs.

Recording calls is also a lot easier now and those recordings can be watched at 1.5x the speed (faster if you’re really ambitious and you don’t have a fast talker like me on the call). You can also skip around in recordings to find applicable discussion rather than sift through it all. Having every person on every call by default doesn’t always value their time and smaller calls also provide more personal connection opportunities which are important in remote relationships. I asked our team to start considering who is “optional” to encourage people to make choices with their time, ideally empowering the individual participant by including them in the decision of attendance. A true benefit of this is reminding every team member that their time is valuable and we want to treat it that way.

“ Time is, hands down, our most coveted, most unrenewable resource. If being on the receiving end of one of life’s most valuable gifts fails to leave you with a lump in your throat or butterflies in your stomach, then you’re not paying attention.” — Brené Brown, Dare To Lead

Non-meeting time is essential and needs to be protected

A lot of companies have embraced a “no-meeting day”, but it can be difficult to protect because it’s the easiest-looking calendar time to schedule a meeting during. But it needs to be protected. A “no-meeting” day is exactly what it sounds like, no scheduled meetings on a predetermined day. Besides providing space to work on larger projects, “no-meetings day” has two other important benefits:

1. More uninterrupted work time to free up brain space. Being able to really focus requires time. Ideally, we want our teams to be able to focus enough to consider beyond the immediate ‘ask’. Time management is really distracting, when you’re hopping from meeting to meeting you’re always watching the clock as you work. Fewer meeting interruptions open up thought space that is essential to opportunity growth and quality of work.
2. Limiting meeting availability forces prioritization and encourages problem-solving. Having to schedule around a “no-meeting day”, can help weed out unnecessary meetings and encourage independent or creative problem-solving. If your go-to person to solve an issue isn’t available and it’s time-sensitive, what’s your next move? Ultimately this should encourage growth, as well as cut down on the infamous ‘this could have been an email’ situation, or more likely now, ‘this could have been tackled asynchronously’.

When I worked at MKG, I had the team change our schedule so recurring client calls were Tuesdays-Thursdays and we used Mondays and Fridays as “catch-up” from/before the weekend days. Using the existing framework, we moved the majority of recurring internal meetings to Mondays and Fridays. This freed up more time Tuesday — Thursday and one of these days became the “no-meetings day”, though it differed based on each person’s client schedule. Having the “no-meetings day” being on Tues-Thurs meant it was less likely to fall on a holiday or PTO and more likely to be consistently available to the team was a bit plus.

Don’t be daunted if it’s not feasible to schedule the same no-meeting day for everyone on the same day due to different time zones and client availability. Look for opportunities to be creative and flexible and avoid being rigid or complicated about something that is meant to be helpful. If you can pick and follow a company-wide “no-meetings day” it sets a standard that’s easier to support, but it does come at the cost of individual or team-based flexibility.

Meetings are costly, both in time and the energy

Chopped-up schedules interrupt deep thinking and negatively impact work quality and output. If you also start thinking in terms of cost impact, the larger the list of attendees- the more expensive a meeting becomes-especially if it is recurring.

When I have a heavy meeting day on a day that I’m mentally “in the zone” and could dive in and get a lot of work done, it’s frustrating and demoralizing. It creates a clear cost to my time in meetings, and begs the question ‘are these meetings more valuable than the to-dos on my plate?’ Sometimes the answer is a clear YES, but sometimes it’s a clear NO.

And don’t forget with the cost of meetings, it’s not only the time and energy it takes for the actual meeting, but it’s also the preparation and the next steps they typically require from the organizer and attendees. Rarely do we have a meaningful meeting without preparation and next steps.

Find a strategy to cut down on the right meetings and keep the meetings that add value

Live collaboration is still valuable. Creativity can feed off of the energy from other people, questions can come up from hearing other points of view and ideas, and there can be magic in those meetings. There’s also the fact that when working remotely we need to intentionally create connections with each other and interactions, and meetings are a necessary part of that. It’s essential to strategically find that balance between meetings and work time to not lose the values that meetings can produce while also not losing the value of interrupted work time.

Fortunately, approaching meetings systemically rather than individually actually makes it easier to find your balance.

To create a list of “essential recurring meetings” I considered:

• What meetings contribute to our financial success?
• What meetings are important to workflow?
• What meetings support our company values and culture?

Critically reviewing our meetings against these three categories, I created this list:

Client Relationship Meetings to Keep:

Client Calls: We had weekly and bi-weekly work sessions for clients that were essential to those relationships and collaboration.

Workflow Meetings to Keep:

• Expert Team Meetings: These supported our team’s growth, collaboration, and connections
• Stand-ups: These allowed the team to quickly connect on in-progress priorities to troubleshoot efficiently and are directly owned by the client circle
• Weekly AD sprint planning: This meeting mapped the next week’s work schedule and supported real-time prioritization with team members working across multiple ADs

Company Values/Culture Meetings to Keep:

• 1-on-1s: The meetings where team members check in on how things are going, get and give feedback, and are supported on growth.
• Retrospective: Our weekly all-agency to share work retrospectives, brainstorm on clients, and each share professional and personal “thankful” moments from our week. This connected the team as a larger whole, but eventually, we did move this to bi-weekly.

I worked with the team to move internal meetings to Mondays and Fridays as much as possible, delete any recurring meetings that didn’t make this list, and consider the frequency of these recurring meetings against valuing their work time. One of our team members, Nathan Stenberg, also suggested adding an indicator of “internal” meetings for better visibility in prioritizing time so we added “IN” at the beginning of all internal meetings. I then asked the ADs to work with the 1:1s and client circles and make sure that everyone, including them, has a clearly indicated “no-meetings day” on their weekly calendar.

Having the Right Tools for Asynchronous work & structure for impactful meetings

Here are some examples of tools that support collaborations, reviews, and approvals without meeting.

1. Asana: A digital project management system enable visibility into what someone is working on, request feedback or information, store a change log and references, and now it even allows video comments through Vimeo
2. Zoom Chat or Slack: AIM but better right? An easy-to-use chat application that your full team uses and is accountable for being available and responding on. Create rooms based on small teams and important topics/projects to help filter information.
3. Google Workspace: If you can avoid server life, using a tool like this that’s lightweight with collaboration features prioritized is a game changer. The docs/sheets/slides allow you to work on documents at the same time and easily be able to see who revised what and be able to go back to previous file versions if you need to.
4. Loom: The little video recording tool that could… Loom is amazing for async explanations where you want to share a file, desktop or screen. I use it whenever I’m sending something for review that requires visual context. It also can be handy if you’re concerned about tone and want to be able to use your voice or video. Zoom also allows you to record, but I find loom to be lighter weight and a better fit for short explanations.

When meetings do add value it’s important to structure them for success ahead of time. This means clearly communicating roles and expectations so everyone attending knows how they should show up and what we’re working towards. It’s not just a way to create purposeful, efficient meetings, this also shows you value each other’s time with the prep and clear expectations.

I made this cheat sheet for our team to help guide whether to have a meeting and how to structure them for maximum value.

Additional Resources on the Topic:

• This Is How 4 Leaders Fixed Their Company’s Meeting Overload Problem — The Muse — by Alyse Kalish
• Stop the Meeting Madness — HBR — by Leslie A. Perlow, Constance Noonan Hadley, and Eunice Eun
• 4 Ways to Have Fewer Meetings at Work — Zapier — by Ben Johnson
• Why You Need an Untouchable Day Every Week — Medium — by Neil Pasricha

Originally published at https://mkgmarketinginc.com.