Everyone wants fewer meetings – they’re inefficient, lack consistent structure, and waste valuable time. In the extreme, our days are full of other people’s priorities, leaving us toiling into the early evening to catch up. Meetings are where we do our worst work. It’s the easiest place to say the first thing that pops into your head without having thought it through. Listening is less mentally expensive than reading and reacting is less mentally expensive than critical thinking, making meetings an expensive way for people to give cheap effort. Yet, it’s seen as completely normal to schedule a meeting in place of sending a well-written email.
But if we all hate meetings so much, why aren’t we doing anything about it? We don’t seem to know how to get work done any other way. By being the default way to do group work, meetings become a magnet for all group work. Everyone knows how to have meetings. We have meetings at home, we have meetings at school – we’ve spent our whole lives understanding how to use meetings to get things done. We assume that the way you do work is by getting people together in a room and….doing things. And even with the countless technology platforms out there supposedly “changing how we work,” we haven’t seen a solution, at scale, replace the over-saturation of meetings in the average workplace.
But there is hope. Instead of seeking to make an “all at once” shift away from meetings in your workplace, you should start by using meetings more intentionally. This lays the ground work for shifting away from meetings deliberately, where appropriate. By better understanding how your team wants to work together, how meetings fit into that, and where meetings do and don’t add value, you’ll minimize the need for useless meetings.
Establishing team norms
Step one when moving away from a “meetings mindset” should start by working with a consistent team. Work groups with consistent membership have the luxury of challenging the assumed “we should use meetings to get our work done” because you can choose to establish your own rules and untether yourselves from defaults. Every team should consciously establish their own norms for how they work together, the way they assign work, and the pace they want to work at. This eliminates the need for constant check-ins and discussion. The simplest way to do this? By asking the question: “are we all satisfied with how work gets done?”
My wife and I don’t use ad-hoc meetings to complete our couple’s projects. We’re able to set goals/objectives for the various things we’re working on and work at our own pace/time. We’ve benefited from frequency of collaboration, a mix of synchronous/asynchronous methods of communicating, and establishing working norms for how we choose to work together. My wife and I made a conscious choice to hold a short once a week meeting after breakfast on Saturday where we discuss the coming week and our to-do list. This meeting takes the place of other ad-hoc mini meetings and allows us to be less reactive and more prepared when we get together. It may not necessarily work for everyone but it works for us, based on shared buy-in to a collective norm.
While every partnership is different, all team based work is enhanced by a clear understanding of how we’re going to get work done and what, specifically, is going to get done. It’s the lack of these basic structures that enables the “we should just have a meeting” default. Using overarching structures like these, you can give your teams the ability to have more productive meetings.
Having better meetings
Obviously, phasing-in these new structures takes time. It’s not easy to replace old habits. But like learning to get in a morning workout, or getting to bed earlier, change starts with small, incremental steps. Just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, you’re not going to move yourself to some nirvana-state of meeting bliss overnight.
Once your team decides on some set norms and rhythms, work towards efficiency and structure with your meetings. Focus on getting as much work done outside of meetings as possible. Another way to think of this is a “we should only meet when we absolutely have to” mindset. And when the team does meet, there should be a clear structure/agenda and routine to how the meetings are conducted – again, consistency/norms are your friend. The goal is to spend as little time as possible using shared blocked time and as much time as possible using individual blocked time. Meetings become a place to a) review the work that was done b) clarify and validate team goals c) distribute work appropriately. Meetings feel smoother when you aren’t wasting time on things that would have been covered in advance using proactive time and allowing people to work at their own pace. Amazon famously has a rule for providing time at the front of meetings to review relevant context before starting the core discussion as a way for people to use proactive vs reactive energy.
It’s important to re-emphasize that this only works with teams that are cohesive, with minimal involvement from non-team members. Whenever the makeup of a team changes, that means orienting new people to teams norms, which is a) challenging and b) creates friction (part of why on-boarding new employees is so hard).
Ultimately, better meetings means fewer meetings. This intentional approach puts immediate pressure on the informal “ad-hoc” meetings that pepper our calendars. Unstructured meetings are often thrown together as an afterthought and an easy “when in doubt” option for answering simple questions. As a result, a more organized team will have little use (or tolerance) for messy meetings. The thirty minute meeting to answer one question is eventually seen as being easily satisfied by one well-written email. By starting to shift the culture on what a meeting should look like, it’ll give more people permission to try new ways of being productive outside of meetings. You’ll have a healthy addition of “Is this something we could handle via email?” to your workplace conversations.
The best thing most of us can say for the past eighteen months is we’ve been given a chance to see new experiments on the nature of group work. The hybrid work-from-home model has forced a re-evaluation of our collective understanding of workplace norms and tools. I’m optimistic that we’ll have a new set of examples of how teams can adapt and evolve their methods of collaboration to emphasize more semi-synchronous forms of work with meetings being reserved for their most optimal use. Until we see widespread adoption of this new normal, leaders should continue doing their part in daily life to encourage a more productive approach to teamwork and meetings.
Good luck out there.
Patrick