The end of weekly meetings
We’ve recently decided to put an end to our weekly events team meetings, at least as a weekly standard occurrence.
These meetings were quite useful to begin with, as I was new to the organisation and didn’t really know what anyone’s working week looked like. It was was also a good way of opening up lines of communication between each other and to better understand what our respective workloads looked like.
After a discussion we decided that they were no longer useful, and a slew of articles online (including this great post by Jason Fried of Basecamp) suggest that the same thing is true for a lot of of organisations. Worse than that, I think that they were actively hindering our attempts to improve how we work together.
Our team day was an attempt to bring us together, but these meetings were essentially doing the opposite. We had discussed what a good team looked like, yet we were outlining our work as individuals. By bringing our lists of tasks to the meeting, we were sharing how busy we were, and essentially, reinforcing why each of us couldn’t better support our colleagues whilst doing our dayjobs. We were focusing on tasks instead of where we could add value.
Culture is a word that’s bandied around a lot in public services and beyond. Yet as I’ve said (or stolen) before, it is essentially the behaviour that we reward and punish. We were encouraging each other to list how busy we were and getting recognition of that fact.
We then decided to talk about our capacity and capability to our team meetings, before taking a different approach altogether. We now have a Help Box on our whiteboard where can each list what we’d like help with, and people can offer assistance when they have the opportunity. I’m conscious that I now have the opportunity to reward very different behaviours - when people share that they are struggling, which takes guts when we work in a society that punishes failure (which has no benefit in complex environments) and also for helping each other out.
Dan Pink has argued that we are predominantly motivated by autonomy, mastery, and purpose in his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Each member of the team has control of their own area of work, and everyone is definitely motivated to improve the service that we offer. By taking away old-school models of motivation like fear of punishment, we are in a better position to improve what we do.
We don’t know whether this will work for us yet (time will tell), but intuitively, this feels better. The information that we were sharing is available if we care to look for it, it just means that I need to work a bit harder to make that visible and that I need to further encourage informal communication and collaboration. At the very least we’re saving the meeting time (4 times over when you think about staff time), and if we get this right, we’ll also work better together.
