Oftentimes, teams default to meetings as the primary way to communicate with one another about projects and updates. And, while meetings are certainly valuable for collaborating, addressing blockers, and connecting as a team, meeting overload can lead to decreased productivity and engagement, and burnout. Take a daily standup meeting as an example. A minute standup for a group of 12 takes away hours of focus time from your team each month.
Too many meetings is a team problem that is best remedied with team-level solutions. Instead, focusing on dedicated ways to collaborate asynchronously, protecting individual work time, and creating norms and guidelines for communication can help your team improve the flow of information and move away from such a meeting-heavy culture.
This should help you identify meetings you no longer need or meetings that can be moved to an async format. Async communication happens in writing, instead of in-person. Async communication works really well for meetings like standups and status updates. Make the shift from back-to-back meetings to asynchronous communication a seamless one with the following guidelines and templates. These will help your team get the most out of async communication and simplify the sharing process. To strengthen async communication even further, it can be helpful to define rules of engagement for the tools and apps your team uses too.
We use Slack for timely, short messages; email for more detailed, non-urgent messages; and Zoom for collaboration or discussion. Use these templates to shift your current meetings to an asynchronous format or prepare beforehand with a pre-read or meeting prep to save time and align. Tip: If you do standups daily, you might try swapping out different questions throughout the week. Example: On Mondays, share your weekly focus. Asynchronous status update template Goal: Sync up on a certain project or initiative.
Team meeting pre-read template Goal: Align beforehand to fuel a shorter, more engaging discussion in person. Retro prep template Goal: Prep ideas before you meet for a shorter, more productive retro. And protecting blocks of time as focused work time too. Studies show that beyond this , the number of connections between individuals becomes too great and humans struggle to cope with this much complexity. If you walk into a meeting room with more than 9 people in it, ask everyone to justify their presence, or whether there is something else they could be doing and simply receive the meeting notes.
You can fix this long-term people by making sure that people have a clear idea their roles, responsibilities and assignments are. You never know where you might end up. Topics: management and leadership meetings teamwork decisions collaboration. This means that beyond the impact we aim to make for our clients, we also work to make a positive impact for our employees, suppliers, community, and the environments.
Read our B Corp TM assessment. A weekly newsletter of the top articles that inspire our work, as well as info on August jobs, events, blog posts, and podcasts. The real reason you have too many meetings. Max Sather. First, a story…. You can improve this tomorrow by using the following quick checklist of thing you can start doing tomorrow in each of your meetings: A facilitator, or at the very least a time keeper.
Someone with the confidence and authority to call when conversation is going off topic. An agenda. Good agendas are questions only, and relate specifically to the stated meeting purpose. At August, we encourage agendas to be built i n the room at the start of the meeting.
At August, it is our strong conviction that there are only four real meeting purposes: Prioritization e. Preparing for your meeting is very important. If possible, you should create an agenda a day or two ahead of time.
Communicate your agenda with participants so that they know what to expect in the meeting and so that they can prepare to participate. Your meeting—and therefore, your agenda—must also have a clear purpose. Determine what you want to get out of the meeting, how long the meeting will take, and who needs to provide input. Learn how to prepare the ideal agenda for more productive meetings.
When calling a meeting, make sure that only the people who really need to be there are invited. Large meetings are good if the meeting is informational, such as reporting quarterly earnings.
But in a planning meeting where decisions need to be made, fewer people may be better. Sometimes you may be invited to a meeting as a courtesy. This will keep organizers from scheduling meetings during those times so you can focus on completing your work. Let meeting organizers know that you will only attend meetings on this day.
This frees up four solid days for you to focus on completing tasks. You can get team status through email. Spend time in your meeting discussing and solving problems and assigning tasks. Lucidchart can help you create and share documents like product roadmaps, workflows, schedules, kanban boards, and other types of visual documents that will help your team to stay focused, keep on track, and be productive during meetings.
If you make it through your planned agenda in less time, adjourn the meeting and let employees get back to work. Most people are more than happy to leave a meeting early. You may not have all the right people in the room with you and you run the risk of turning a productive, short meeting into a long, unfocused meeting.
Instead of scheduling a formal meeting, use messaging apps like Slack or Skype to quickly resolve issues. Reach out to subject matter experts with a phone call to quickly resolve issues rather than taking the time to plan a meeting. When possible, take full advantage of other communication options like email and chat to take care of smaller items of business.
This will help ensure that people leave meetings feeling like that time was well spent. Make your meetings effective and take action faster when you use Lucidchart as your digital whiteboard.
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