Reform your startup’s meeting culture

Bad meetings are the fast food of the knowledge worker; it’s so deliciously quick and easy to throw a 60-minute default meeting on everyone’s schedule, but the long-term costs are extremely unhealthy.

Busy meeting organizers drive-thru schedule meetings because they think they don’t have time to plan. They expect good outcomes to come from little preparation, which doesn’t happen. The meetings are being held and progress is stilted.

One way to save everyone significant time (and win lots of friends) would be to just get rid of all meetings, but a well-prepared and well-run session can expedite communication and get a team closer to its goals. Unfortunately, most meetings are lazily planned and poorly run, imprisoning attendees and halting productivity.

So how can you separate the good meetings from the bad?

Measure your meeting waistline

No one measures the impact of their meetings. So the first step is to start keeping meeting metrics so that you can identify the bad meetings on your teams’ calendars.

My company has created a calendar assistant that automatically measures and stops bad meetings before they occur, but if you can’t automate the prevention of bad meetings, survey and learn from attendees after the meeting to record and measure them.

Create taxonomies and quantify the types of meetings that are being held — for example: “information sharing,” “brainstorming,” “1:1,” “decision-making,” etc.

After several months (ideally a year) of collecting metrics, you can grade the quality and look for patterns. You will probably find something along these lines:

• Very few employees decline meetings, even when it’s obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.
• Most “information sharing” meetings really should have been an email.
• Recurring meetings see a sharp decline in efficacy after the first few iterations and should be canceled when they lose their sheen.

The data is also very likely to show a significant lack of meeting hygiene — you’ll find an asymmetry between the amount of time spent preparing and the amount of time spent meeting. That can be a potential waste of resources, as poor preparation will yield a low-quality meeting.

Establish norms for the minimum levels of preparation required before a meeting can be held. Allow for exceptions, but measure and monitor them so that the team doesn’t revert to bad habits. Once a higher degree of preparation is required, there will be better and fewer meetings.

Abolish the “no declines” culture

Once someone knows that a meeting on their calendar isn’t worth their time, they should feel enabled to decline the meeting. Most knowledge workers have a lot of autonomy, but CYA culture often prevents people from doing the right thing because they feel the need to do the safe thing.

CYA disincentivizes bravery in the workplace and people end up quietly miserable, attending bad meetings day after day. Declining a bad meeting should never be taboo, and you should reiterate your trust in the team and challenge them to spend their and others’ time with more intention. Help them feel empowered to decline a bad meeting.

Cut back on “information sharing” meetings

If your team has a lot of meetings with a presenter and a passive audience, you need to ask why it wasn’t replaced with an email, Slack thread or internal blog post. More often than not, you can reduce the number of workday interruptions by cutting down on “information sharing” meetings.

Instead of a status meeting, send the team an email. If you’re afraid that they won’t read the email, I have news for you: They aren’t listening in the meeting. Send the email and allow work to get done.

Often, the intention of a sharing meeting is to be transparent. The intention is noble: Sharing is good! Don’t schedule a meeting, though. Information sharing meetings and status update meetings are perfect candidates for asynchronous communication channels like email or chat. Or, you could create an internal blog. The blogging company Automattic shares all meeting minutes in searchable internal blog posts, decreasing emails and meeting time while increasing transparency.

Cancel old recurring meetings

Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies. Chances are, a significant number of your teams’ recurring meetings involve status updates, intended to keep people accountable. Sometimes the reason a recurring meeting is scheduled is to block time on calendars already littered with meetings, exacerbating the lack of work time in the workday.

Go on a recurring meetings purge. Have your team decline/delete them all and start over with the mandate that they are properly prepared and have explicit goals and intentions. Tell the attendees to decline the recurring meetings if the efficacy of the meeting diminishes.

Preempt the great resignation

With about 26% of workers saying they will look for a new job after the pandemic, the time to focus on employee wellness was yesterday. The morbid/good news for leaders who are just getting started is that they are not alone in their neglect of work-life balance.

Your organization wants to create value and your employees want to do fulfilling work, learn new things and direct their own lives, but no one gets what they are looking for if employees are burning out. Focus on work-life balance, experiment and listen to your people. You’ll make things a little better and you’ll show them that you care about their needs.

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