If 29,700 is the answer, what is the question?
By Mary Porter
We needed to make sure that we were ready to discuss points at the meeting, rather than getting people up to speed.
Here at Skyscanner we hold what is known as the 22-minute meeting. We have been doing these for a few months now and the company has embraced how powerful they can be; things get covered quickly and smaller conversations are taken off the table at these meetings (‘taken off line’) so that only the main topics are covered.
Succeeding at the 22-minute meeting format
However, if you want to succeed at making the 22-minute meeting valuable and commonplace, it is vital to make everyone’s initial experiences of these Lean meetings positive. It stands to reason that if you attend a really effective 22-minute meeting and benefit from the time saving it offers, you will feel more inclined to organise your own 22-minute meeting in future, or recommend others do also.
I therefore wanted to share the changes we have implemented which have allowed us to reduce the weekly PR ‘all hands’ meeting (all PR staff at Skyscanner) down from 60 mins to just 22 mins, without compromising on the quality or throughput of the meeting.
Happy talk
Before we embarked on reworking these meetings to reduce waste, we reviewed with the whole team what parts of the existing meeting they found most and least valuable. We discovered that actually one of the things people valued was the chance to chat and catch up with their functional peers, something they missed since the advent of Squadification.
However, we agreed that the weekly team meeting was not the most efficient place for chatter and therefore arranged a monthly social lunch in the café area instead, giving us the opportunity to catch up, informally chat through ideas, challenges etc.
Time after time
Firstly, as you might expect, time was the key focus. People are often not aware how many minutes they have been speaking for (even if everyone else is!) so we agreed each point on the agenda was only allowed a maximum of 5 mins.
In order to keep to this, we took some very basic steps including bringing a large clock along to meetings, having an alarm sound after four mins to warn the speaker they only had a minute left to wrap up their point and then an online version of the clock was shared on desktop so that those on Skype had full visibility too.
Prepare to succeed
We needed to make sure that we were ready to discuss points at the meeting, rather than getting people up to speed. This was vital in achieving a a 22-minute meeting without impacting throughput.
We already used a Trello board to manage the agenda and encourage a feeling of shared ownership of the meeting focus and output. However we now ensure that there is enough detail added to the cards on the board in advance of the meeting so that that people can read it and ask questions where clarity is needed.
Further discussion
If further discussion is needed it is now taken offline for those parties who the conversation is relevant to, rather than everyone sitting through a debate that may not affect them/their market.
Some topics will cause a lot of differing opinion and therefore need full discussion, and people often want to go away and think further.
To meet this need, we have set up a PR slack channel where discussions and debates can take place, with only the resulting solution/proposal being including in the 22-minute meeting agenda.
Stand and deliver
We also realised that we had become a little sloppy with our meeting etiquette with many of us arriving late and/or not really giving our full attention, often distracted by other messages and emails they were receiving. As PR Managers, we have to be available to be contacted by media and our efficient response is what will often secure the coverage for us — it was therefore justifiable that people felt they could not be ‘offline’ for an hour, however for just 22 mins it should not be an issue.
We therefore agreed a definite start time of 9.05am and banned laptops/mobiles, unless presenting. As our APAC staff dial in, these meetings have to be first thing for the EMEA team. This sometimes meant some members of the UK based team were not yet at optimum performance levels — so we decided the sessions needed reenergised and asked everyone to stand (after all, it is only 22 mins).
What we gained
With 15 people usually attending the original 60 min PR meetings we were using two days’ worth of wo/man hours per week, the equivalent of over 100 working days a year!
Over the course of a year, our 22 minute meetings will save us 29,700 minutes as a team! (The answer in the title of this post).
We want to share more
For more tips, Growth Hacks and job roles from across our global offices, sign up for Skyscanner Growth hacks right to your inbox!
About the Author
My name is Mary Porter and I was one of the first 100 employees to join Skyscanner back in 2010. A huge amount has changed since then, not least the fact we now have over 780 staff across 10 offices. Despite this we have retained our start up culture which allows us to experiment with new channels and ideas. I love that Skyscanner supports this without any fear of failure.
You can read my post on Failing Forward at Skyscanner if you enjoyed this one. Do comment below to get talking.
