Let's make meetings less efficient
Everything is about hyper-efficiency these days. In our new world of back-to-back video calls and meetings, the faster we can do what needs to be done and exit the session, the more chance we have of carving out a few minutes for ourselves to do some real work! Meetings can be scheduled by bots, agendas and materials can be shared in advance, a chair can keep track of progress and mute or drop disruptive talkers with a button click, and we can ensure that everyone gets to have their say – including the introverts with their camera’s permanently turned off. We can even get AI generated summary notes sent to us afterward. Does it make us more effective? No. Efficiency and effectiveness are great partners but they are not the same thing. To make your team more effective, you may need to make your meetings less efficient.
We’ve all spent far too many hours in meetings, and probably seen a couple dozen moments of genius leap out, startling as a whale breach from an ocean of boredom. Last year I published a book titled Questions – A User’s Guide, which has some techniques that I’d recommend for more productive and entertaining meetings, since questions are at the heart of most human activity. In my day job, though, I’ve worked in software companies, specializing in optimizing processes. For five years I was at Microsoft, and now I run a startup company that uses AI to make food supply chain processes more efficient and effective. In these companies, my teams have held meetings using the concepts from the Patrick Lencioni book ‘Death by Meeting’:
Daily standups: quick fire rounds where everyone highlights activity in 60 seconds
Weekly one-hour tacticals: to solve short-term issues and blockers
Strategics: which occur ‘as-required’ (but normally quarterly) where we get to look at bigger topics, drink too much alcohol and bond over team activities
When the pandemic hit, my small team switched overnight from a WeWork office to one hundred percent virtual and continued with the Lencioni pattern. Very rapidly, we abandoned our weekly meeting, but the daily standup evolved; instead of the 15 minutes scheduled, we were up to 45 minutes or sometimes an hour. Some of the extra time was taken by deep dives; Shiyi might share the latest results from a data science project, or Bill may give us a detailed explanation of a technical issue blocking product development. At times, I would watch the eyes of our sales leader glaze over as the engineers argued about the nuances of UI or workflow management. On other occasions, we would discuss water-cooler stuff; Paul shared the latest photos of his camping trip in the desert, Holly showed us a video of a bear that had wandered into her garden with no intent of leaving. After the call, these conversations sometimes continued on slack (our message channel). As the team leader, I worried about our efficiency in the calls, and the amount of time they were taking out of our daily schedule.
Then we began to hire new employees, in remote locations. This is a great advantage of the virtual model, hiring the best talent wherever they are based. The original team had all spent at least a year working together in a shared physical workspace, but our new employees we had never met in person. We didn’t have that connection which comes from frequent interaction in an office. I realized that the daily standup calls were critical – because they were achieving some of the functions that would have happened organically in an office:
Learning about our colleagues, their likes & dislikes, their family
Understanding issues in other departments
Cross-fertilizing ideas and best practices
Hearing about the smaller wins & losses shaping the company direction
In short, our daily meetings were sharing and partly defining our culture. They were also a place where that rare but special startup magic can happen – serendipity. A crazy idea from a sales guy can change the product direction, or a chance comment by an engineer can help the VP Biz Dev close a partnership deal by providing an insight he would have missed otherwise.
Multiple studies have shown that successful teams are the ones that care about each other, that care about their company’s mission, and have a say in its direction. Or to express that in a different way, for a person to be truly effective in a team they need to know stuff that may not be in their direct functional role. If we make our meetings highly efficient, we eliminate much of the learnings that used to happen naturally in the office, or in chance encounters at the local Starbucks. I’ve read about some virtual companies using specific happy hour Microsoft Teams calls or building social events into the schedule – and yes, we had fun doing a shared painting class via zoom for our Xmas party – but it’s hard to force people to have fun and swap stories on cue. Better to let this flow of ideas arrive naturally, by giving it time and space in a regular meeting. If you want your employees to feel engaged, to share and shape the culture, and ultimately deliver results, then you need to create an environment for that to occur. For SWARM, that means our daily meeting will take a little longer than perhaps it should, and it won’t be efficient. I believe, though, that it will make us more effective.