Rid of the infinite loop of meetings!
Do you know that feeling when someone asks you: “How was your day?” and you just reply: “I don't know, just meeting after meeting”… In this article I'll give you few ideas why I think we are overwhelmed with the meetings and how I see the way to rid of this infinite loop.
As my career path is going from the small companies to the largest companies in the world, I'm observing one big problem which is more significant for the larger ones. This problem is causing infinite loop of meetings which are not productive at all and they are just wasting money from the company budget without bringing any value in efficient manner.
Last year a lot of articles about Elon Musk's meeting rules has popped up and for example the largest E-commerce company form Czech Republic Alza.cz has tested concept of “DeepWork Wednesday” which was the reaction on the situation caused by movement of day to day work to the home office mostly and increase of the amount of meetings caused by this movement. We have introduced the set of the meeting rules inside our Dr.Max E-commerce department as well. Let me share with you the situations which led us to introduce this set of rules and what are the rules, ie. suggestions to our colleagues how to organize, lead and attend meetings.
Why you should setup the meeting rules?
Usually a lot of meetings have not clear agenda and outcome. There are a lot of attendees which are participating only by listening and not bringing any value to the meeting outcome. People are joining late because of the previous meetings was scheduled tide and so on…
Another topic which is leading to inefficient meetings is the situation that a lot of people are attending meeting after meeting during the whole day and due to the lack of time to respond on emails, chats etc., they are switching context directly on the meeting. This leads to situation that you are not capable fully focus on the meeting agenda and introducing wtfs like: “Oh, sorry could you repeat it, I didn't listen at the moment”.
Next part are the costs of the meeting. By simple math you can calculate the direct costs, but what about the hidden part? Attending a meeting means to prepare your self and what if you are currently working on different topic? You have to switch context and all of you know that context switching has the natural limitations. So as much you have to switch area of your focus within the day that much you are starting be inefficient and this brings additional indirect costs of the meeting.
A lot of people think that a half hour meeting costs a half hour of time, but it doesn't. If you schedule a meeting of 10 people for half a hour it actually costs the company 5 hours of time. To have the full picture of the meeting costs you should add the indirect costs caused by the context switching of each attendee before and after the meeting.
Sounds familiar? I think it does. So how we can easily setup the rules which will help us to be more efficient on the meetings? It's not the rocket science.
What we did to rid of the infinite loop of inefficient meetings?
From the 1st of July 2021 we have introduced a set of suggestions, ie. rules for meeting organization on our E-commerce IT Department. We didn't put them into the stone, but we give the employees chance to follow the rules to help us be more efficient. Also this give our colleagues the right to refuse meeting invitation if one of the rules criteria is not met. So what are the rules we have putted in the place?
No meetings on Wednesday
Inspired by Alza.cz we have realized that Wednesday is the right place where the productivity is on the top and we'd like to give our employees chance to focus only on the stuff which they planned without the context switching and other disturbance.
There are two exceptions from this rule as is the daily meeting of development teams which are practicing SCRUM methodology and second is in case that same production incident take place and cooperation of more than one party is required.
Meetings must have a clear agenda and outcome
The organizer of the meeting must ensure that all invited participants understand why they are invited and what is their role in the meeting at least one day upfront. The attendee could refuse the invitation if those criteria are not meet.
The organizer must ensure that meeting outcome and following action points are clear to all participants and the outcome was documented as the meeting notes and properly attached for future needs. Unless stated otherwise by the agenda meeting organizer is also meeting host — introducing the agenda, moderating the discussion watching the time, etc.
Meeting attendees must understand reason of their participation
This means that if the attendee is not sure about the reason of the participation on the meeting or the agenda is not clear for her/him, they should clarify the need of the participation with the meeting host upfront and in case that meeting host is not able to provide more requested details they are allowed to refuse their participation.
If it is obvious that the attendees are not bringing any value to the meeting even they have already joined, they should excuse themself and leave the meeting as soon as possible.
Meetings shall start and end on time
The meeting host is responsible to manage meeting agenda and watch the time schedule. To ensure that between two meetings you are able at least visit the bathroom and take some refreshment we have introduce the rule which is taking care about it. Each meeting shorter than one hour should end 5 minutes ahead and each meeting longer than one hour should end 10 minutes ahead to give the attendees chance to be on time on the next meeting.
Meetings must be held within working hours
These days a lot of people are working within flexible working hours, for that reason we have introduced following rule. Meetings should take place between 9:00–16:00 CEST only as this is covering the daylight savings and the timezone difference of our company offices. This ensures that the organizer and attendees could have different activities without refusing important meetings.
Before you organize the meeting, think twice if e-mail would be sufficient enough
There are few questions which you should ask yourself before you will organize the meeting. The basics in our eyes are:
- Description fits to an paragraph
- 5 or less questions aimed at specific members
- You only have questions to specific people
- You only need feedback
- You are only sharing straightforward information
- It’s hard to find a fitting slot for everyone
Conclusion
I think it is pretty clear that infinite loop of meetings costs companies around the globe millions of Euros each year for nothing, no value is added to the company, product or customer.
Managers should focus on this and ensure that proper rules for meetings are set up. Employees should have space to focus on their context exclusively without wasting time on the meeting where their participation is not obvious.
You should always think about different approaches how to reach your goal. Meeting should be the last thing you are starting to think about.
