Meetings. We all have them. Most of us hate them. When I ask why, here are some of the responses I hear:
- They take too much time away from our “real work.”
- It's too hard to find time to meet. Our calendars are too full.
- We can't find a place to meet. If we're back in the office, we have no meeting rooms. Or, we have some remote people, so we need several “places” to meet and the technology to support all those places.
Then, there are the meeting cleanliness problems, such as no agenda, no minutes, and no one facilitator.
All of these problems are worse when it comes to so-called hybrid teams. There is not one type of hybrid team. Instead, there are satellite teams and cluster teams. And while some of you work in one building, you only appear to be collocated. Your team does not pass the Allen Curve test of each person being within 8-16 meters of all the other people.
We have possible solutions, but we can't choose a solution without understanding the purpose of the meeting.
Meetings Exist Because They Are Real Work
Why do you ask people to gather at the same time, in the “same” place? (See Decide When You Need To Meet, Workshop, Or Write To Save Energy And Time for more information.) Great meetings have an outcome:
- Decisions: Discuss problems to come to a decision. This includes ranking the backlog, deciding on the project portfolio, and possibly impediment identification and removal. Whatever this discussion is, it leads to a decision. These decisions might create action items.
- Work product: Collaborate to create a work product. This might be story creation and refinement, experiment creation, or any kind of outcome that the team will use to inform its future work.
Then, there are the status or information dissemination meetings. Stop them. Don't go.
Instead, encourage the person who wants to hold this meeting to write down in prose the information they need. Use subheadings, paragraphs, and examples, so people can consume and then use your information.
What if you need to inform people before a decision or collaboration? Write that information down before the meeting and send it in advance. If you can't send it in advance, take the first few minutes of the meeting for everyone to read what you wrote. This is a tactic for anyone who needs to prepare to make good decisions.
Don't make people sit through a deck if they need to discuss or collaborate.
You don't have to go to a meeting if there is no agenda, no outcome, and no minutes. The person who wants that meeting needs to spend the time writing the information down instead. (There's a chapter in Manage It! about meetings. The first section is “Cancel These Meetings.” You are not surprised.)
So meetings—good meetings—are real work. They have outcomes, either a decision, action items, or a work product. But how can you make time to go to meetings?
Our Calendars Are Too Full
John Miller tweeted:
You have too many meetings because you have too many concurrent projects.
Concurrent projects often elevate resource efficiency thinking, not flow efficiency thinking. Resource efficiency thinking says, “We must keep everyone busy all the time.” That means your calendars are impossibly full.
Here's what happens when Jim works alone (resource efficiency thinking) on just two projects:
- Monday, 9 am: Jim starts Project 1. He works alone until 10:30 and realizes he has a question. His management thinks everyone is collocated because they are in the same building. But they are on different floors. The “team” flunks the Allen Curve test. Worse, everyone on the team is working on at least two different projects. Each person decides when they will work on each project.
- Jim uses his backchannel, such as Slack or Teams, to send that question to someone who can answer.
- Jim doesn't want to sit idle, because his manager values busy-ness. But Jim isn't sure what to start on: the next thing in Project 1 or a new thing in Project 2. But his backchannel pings, and it's Tina on Project 2. He switches projects and starts to work with Tina.
Jim is already multitasking, and it's just 10:30 on Monday.
Other People Fill Your Calendar
Let's imagine that Jim wants to leave his calendar as open as possible to allow collaboration with his other team members. But, then other people fill his calendar, especially with standing meetings:
Here's what his calendar looks like Monday afternoon:
- Meetings at 1, 2, 3, and 4 pm. All of these meetings are standing meetings. None of them have an updated agenda. And there are no meeting minutes or action items from last week.
- One of these meetings is a “standup.” For one hour every week, each person explains what they did and what they're planning to do. This is a serial status meeting and offers no value to anyone at all.
Jim doesn't feel as if can decline those meetings. That's because “meeting” is the wrong word for some of these occasions. These occasions are too much information dissemination and too few decisions or work products.
We are good at collaborating when everyone is collocated (within 8 meters of each other) or totally dispersed, as in a nebula team. Collocated and Nebula teams often feel like collocated teams, because we can turn around or walk for under 30 seconds and ask a question. But satellite and cluster teams require tool support.
The Problems
Meetings become problems under these conditions:
- Multitasking between at least two projects. (The more projects, the worse this is.)
- Collaborate challenges. (See Hours Of Overlap, The First Principle Of Successful Distributed Teams for more information.)
- Insufficient information in advance, such as an agenda or ideas to consider.
- Cleanliness: No agenda or minutes. No action items.
We can make meetings work, but hybrid teams need tools.