Meetings don’t get the love they deserve. They may be the most ubiquitous part of our working lives, but these days it feels like contempt for poorly-run meetings is just as universal.
What makes a bad meeting? Most of us know them when have to sit through them. In our experiences, there are a few common threads to most ineffective meetings:
- Lack of Alignment: Participants were not aligned on the meeting’s purpose
- Inadequate Tooling: The goal of the meeting required agreement from all parties, but there was no tool in place to gather input
- Too Many Distractions: The meeting got sidetracked and the facilitator did not bring the group back to the original purpose
- Lack of Follow Up: The attendees who were supposed to provide a follow-up failed to do so
Here at Coda, we feel strongly that meetings can be a whole lot better. We feel so passionate about better meetings that we worked with the Gamestorming team to build a meeting toolkit template, launched a dedicated page in our template gallery, and regularly run review sessions with our teams to make their meetings run more efficiently.
Today, we’d love to show you some examples from our new in-doc templates that will enable you to run your next meeting more effectively, right from your doc.
Email A Section
Ever been to a great meeting, only to leave and have everyone forget the details on what was decided? Or, have you ever needed to reference what was said at a meeting at some later date? Effective meetings don’t end when the meeting slot is done. Leaving with a clear record of the meeting is vital for all your attendees to act on any decisions made. Our Email a Section template makes it easy to finish a meeting and quickly get contextual notes and follow-ups out to attendees. We like to put it at the bottom of our documents, take notes above, and then send out the notes to all attendees when the meeting is over.
Topic Voting
Many ineffective meetings suffer from a lack of consensus on what the most pressing questions are. Our Topic Voting template is an easy way for all attendees to ask questions and rank those that others have. We like to take 5–10 minutes at the beginning of our meetings for attendees to fill out the tracker and upvote questions that have been asked by teammates. Drop the Topic Voting template in your meeting doc and you’ll always have a visible way to know which topics require focus and would benefit from resolution in a group setting. You can also try this meeting poll template.
Team Sentiment Tracker
Team meetings can be a bit of a grab bag. Some team members might need direction on their projects, some may need help with important decisions, and others may want to talk about recent company-wide news. Whatever the goal of your team meetings, it’s always helpful to get everyone on the same page, or at least understand where differences lie. At Coda, we do that by taking a quick pulse check at the beginning of our team meetings on the current sentiment of all team members. Our Team Sentiment Tracker gives you a quick way to figure out how your teammates are feeling and who could use support from the group.
In-doc timer
Ever helplessly watched a well-planned meeting get derailed by a tangential topic? Good meetings depend on attendees staying focused within the given timeframe. Our In-Doc Timer template is the easiest way to make sure you’re using everyone’s time wisely. Drop it at the top of your doc, set your meeting length, click start, and you’ll always be conscientious of exactly how much time is remaining.
That’s it for this week! How do you plan on using our in-doc templates for meetings?
Have ideas for other templates we should make? Send us your favorites and be sure to check back next week where we highlight another use case.
