9 Steps to Occam's Razor-sharp Meetings

Listening time: 9 min.

9 Steps to Occam's Razor-sharp Meetings

Reading time: 10 min.

Meeting is one of the most popular team management tools among leaders around the world. An effective meeting allows you to synchronize the team and discuss solutions to specific problems and blockers. An ineffective meeting burns the organization's money and demotivates employees.

By the word "meeting" we mean:

• scheduled regular meeting;
• scheduled irregular meeting;
• sudden meeting or a call.

How much do meetings cost?

Bain & Company says that organizations spend up to 15% of their working time on meetings. At the same time, from 37% to 50% of meetings are useless and do not bring any value.

Martin Luenendonk claims that average middle-level manager spends up to 35% of his working time at meetings, and a top manager spends up to 50%.

According to Atlassian's data, the average employee spends 31 hours a month on completely unproductive meetings. Taking the rate of $50/hour, we get that in this case the cost of useless meetings per team member is $1,550 per month or $18,600 per year. With a team size of 10 people - $15,500 per month or $186,000 per year. Impressive, isn't it?

At the same time Atlassian adds:

• 91% of respondents answered that they dreamed at meetings, thought about something of their own, but not about the meeting;
• 39% of respondents said they slept during meetings;
• 45% of respondents at meetings felt depressed because of the "endless number of meetings";
• 73% of respondents at meetings were engaged in other tasks;
• 47% of respondents complained that meetings are the timekiller №1.

Hi, I didn't quite understand the task, so I've decided to make a quick call with you

Meeting is one of the most popular team management tools among managers around the world. An effective meeting allows you to synchronize the team and discuss solutions to specific problems and blockers. An ineffective meeting burns the organization's money and demotivates employees.

Hi, I didn't quite understand the task, so I've decided to call you quickly

According to Atlassian's data, the average employee spends 31 hours a month on completely unproductive meetings. Taking the rate of $50/hour, we get that in this case the cost of useless meetings per team member is $1,550 per month or $18,600 per year. With a team size of 10 people - $15,500 per month or $186,000 per year. Impressive, isn't it?

We've been working remotely and studying the processes of our remote clients and partners for many years, so we are sure that the video conference format works better than the call without video. There are a lot of reasons for this phenomenon (for example, let's remember about 39% of "meeting sleepers").

Let's take a closer look at the types of meetings that are most often used by remote teams:

1. Scheduled regular meetings - weekly, monthly, quarterly. Usually they are attended by a large or key part of the company's employees, project team, product, etc. As a rule, participants know the schedule of regular meetings and the approximate agenda of each of them. With competent settings, this type of meetings can benefit the company.
2. Scheduled irregular meetings are familiar from the phrases "lets discuss this tomorrow at 15:00/next Tuesday afternoon". Unlike regular meetings, the purpose, agenda and what exactly is expected from a particular participant of the meeting are not always clear. It is desirable to transfer such a format of meetings to a regular one, if this is not possible - minimize the number of such meetings.
3. Sudden meetings and calls - usually begin like this: "Can we call now?/Hi, I didn't quite understand the task, so I've decided to call you quickly." This format of communication is a leader among timekillers: it can happen often, takes a lot of time, breaks the workday plan, distracts from current tasks. There are critical situations (fire, natural disaster, etc.) in which a sudden call can indeed be justified, although even in this case it is more effective to immediately inform all team members about it in a special chat or channel, for example General (in a separate article we will consider the basic structure of communication channels). Our recommendation is to form the culture in such a way that the need for spontaneous calls disappears completely over time.

What to do?

1. Appoint the persons who have the right to schedule meetings. Most often, such persons in the team are project/product managers, team leaders, department heads, etc. Taking into account the specifics of their teams' activities, only they can competently schedule regular meetings and minimize the number of irregular ones. All emerging important issues of team members are added to the Agenda and discussed at the next meeting. Each of the team members should be able to add their questions to the agenda.
2. Develop and implement a calendar teamwork process. Each team member keeps his own up-to-date calendar, the manager has access to all calendars and selects a time for a meeting in which all the necessary team members are available. This eliminates the classic process of a long determination of a convenient time for everyone by dozens of iterations "Are you comfortable at this time?". In a separate article, we will look at the basic principles of teamwork with Google Calendar, which can be transferred to any other virtual calendar.
3. Develop and implement the process of organizing and holding the meeting - a simple and understandable mini-process for regular and irregular meetings. The key stages of such a process include: preparing an Agenda, determining the participants and time of the meeting, sending invitations to the meeting, receiving confirmation of participation from each participant, holding a meeting (synchronizing, discussing solutions to problems, filling out a protocol), publishing the results of the meeting and the next steps with deadlines and responsible persons in a certain channel (Follow-Up). An example of a Follow-Up is here.
4. Create a schedule of regular meetings. Based on the objectives of a specific meeting (team meeting /development team meeting / project call, etc.), leader decides on the frequency of its holding. In our experience, it is optimal to conduct team-wide calls once a month, department meetings once a week, calls on a specific project - from 1 to 3 times a week, 1:1 meetings - bi-weekly.
5. Determine the optimal duration of the meeting. According to our research, too long meeting (from 90 minutes) takes a lot of energy, blurs focus, leads to demotivation. Too short (less than 15 minutes) - does not allow a full discussion of the agenda. In our opinion, the optimal duration is 25 and 45 minute meetings. Why 25 and 45, and not 30 and 60? By scheduling meetings in a row, closely without interruptions, we do not give the opportunity to recover (do a light warm-up, drink water, etc.), which affects the effectiveness of each subsequent meeting and the working day as a whole.
6. Determine the format of meetings. Only by voice or with video? We've been working remotely and studying the processes of our remote clients and partners for many years, so we are sure that the video conference format works better than the call without video. There are a lot of reasons for this phenomenon (for example, let's remember about 39% of "meeting sleepers"). In a separate article, we will discuss in more detail the reasons and life hacks for the formation of a video conferencing culture.
7. Determine the meeting tool. Together with our clients and partners, we used both our own custom solutions and popular services: Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, etc. Each of them has its own specifics (we will prepare an overview and our use cases in a separate material), but, in general, any of them can be used as the main tool for holding remote team meetings. Each of them has the minimum necessary functions: supports the format of video calls, ability to display the screen, etc.
8. Develop and implement a meeting logging process. A meeting without an Agenda and Follow-Up becomes a friendly conversation that burns time and money of company. Confluence, Notion and other similar tools help to organize both the process of preparing and storing meeting notes. The owner of the meeting notes document keeps the meeting notes up to date. During the meeting, it is permissible for another team member to fill in the protocol as a secretary, but the Follow-Up is published by the leader. Here we've prepared for you a ready-to-implement meeting notes template - use it, supplement, measure the result, implement!
9. Develop and implement a meeting recording process. Call recording allows you to return to the meeting at any time. This is especially convenient when one of the participants could not attend it, but he needs to know how the call went. Not every service has the ability to record and store video calls. We tried recording calls with temporary storage in Zoom (with further uploading to our cloud storage), Skype and Google Meet (we recorded the screen with sound through services such as Loom, TechSmith Capture, Bandicam, etc. and uploaded them to our cloud storage), everyone has the right to exist, everyone has advantages and cons, you can create a mini-process for each format.

We understand that it is impossible to make all meetings go perfectly. However, with the help of these steps, you can significantly increase their productivity.

On average, by making these adjustments to the process of working with meetings, it is quite possible to free up to 60-70% of the time spent on emptiness and make team members not only happy to attend meetings, but also take an active part in them. Test, measure the result, implement!

Key stages of the mini-process of organizing and holding the meeting

Thank you for the call, Team! Our next steps:

• Feature with reviews - @alex_lomov found a solution to the problem with Safari. He plans to finish everything tomorrow before 12:00 Msc and pass to @zoya_karceva on QA. @zoya_karceva plans to complete QA by the end of the working day. She will let us know about the results in the task. If everything goes smoothly we will be able to roll out the feature even a few days earlier than planned!

Person responsible: Alex Lomov, Zoya Karceva


• Greeting card for customers - @natalia_kopteva is waiting for a layout from @danila_sedyh today, after that she will prepare a newsletter here. We plan to launch the mailing this Friday at 12:00 Msc.

Person responsible: Natalia Kopteva, Danila Sedyh

• Yaroslava's vacation. From Monday @yaroslava_klimova will be on vacation. She will come back on Wednesday, October 12. @irina_barinova takes her tasks, so from Monday on the Yaroslava's tasks we turn to Irina.

Person responsible: Yaroslava Klimova, Irina Barinova

• Next meeting according to the schedule: October 5.
• Call recording is here.

Have a good end of the week!