A Year of Cancelled Meetings

Feeling energized and ready to tackle a new year and new projects? There is this one big component of every startup you might face every day: how many meetings do we have this week? We would never say meetings are unimportant for any business, but ugghhhh, more often than not they take away that precious time and end up being just a waste of time. Most of the problems could be solved by simple email with a list of questions and marked as important. I don’t know how it became this way but I can say for sure 90% of meetings in 2016 were unnecessary and no progress was made.

And to make your week even more productive, meetings on their own resulted in more meetings! We have a meeting about when to schedule our monthly meetings and to talk to each other about what times work for us! There should be a tool for this, right? I am not saying we should cancel all meetings, no, that’s not the point. It’s important to get together and work on the project or on the problems you are facing. It’s a great way to bond with your team and get to the core of your project issues. HOWEVER, NOT ALL THE TIME.

In 2017, every time I want to schedule a meeting, I will cancel it twice. Every time I’ll try to resolve a problem without getting everyone in the same room. If the 3rd time there is no way this issue or problem or a bug can’t be fixed, only then we should have coffee and talk about it. Don’t waste your time, don’t waste someone else’s time.

Meetings are expensive. You are basically taking your team away from what they were doing. More than often, half the attendees can just get up and leave, as there is no need for them to be there. Almost every meeting we have ends early, but you still sit there and talk about stuff that has nothing to do with the project or the problem you are trying to solve. Most of the clients we work with right now schedule our meetings together on a weekly basis, plus sprint retrospectives and sprint planning every 2 weeks, and don’t forget about sprint planning meetings every 2–3 days.

It happens only to review what’s been done and to see what’s ahead of us. However, when you think about it, all of that could be done on Google Hangouts or Skype. So, why do we agree to it? Why do we spend 1.5 hours on the train each way, 40 minutes talking about the weather, and 10 minutes showing what we have accomplished? Because people are social creatures. And if the client feels the need for human interaction to be sure his money is going into right direction, we can meet face-to-face.

But now we are faced with a question: should we bill them for all this time we spend on the meeting, instead of doing actual work? One might assume, if you spend even one minute doing anything project related, it needs to be billable. In our case, figuring out at the beginning of the project how we want to treat meetings and everything related to them seemed to work great! Giving our client a clear understanding of what is billable and why before the project has begun results in few to no issues and questions when sending out an invoice.

Below is our meeting plan for 2017:

· Include a “Meetings” section in our proposal and state if it’s billable;

· Every time a meeting comes up in the schedule, cancel it the first two times and try to resolve the issue by emails or calls;

· After a meeting is scheduled, organize all the material 1 to 3 days before the meeting;

· Share the agenda and goals in advance via email/slack to keep everyone on track;

· Have ONE leader/presenter/owner of the meeting with a clear agenda and purpose;

· Must not be longer than 30 minutes when internal and 1 hour when meeting with a client;

· If you are not interested, have nothing to say, nothing to contribute, just leave right away;

· If finished early, meeting is done, no wasting time on discussing the weather for the next half hour;

· If you are over 10 minutes late, you are getting everyone Birch coffee for lunch (if in NYC) or donating $20 to our “let’s all go skiing!” piggy bank;

· After the meeting, the leader of the meeting emails an overview of the meeting, which includes the agenda, questions resolved, issues that are still standing, and the next steps need to be taken.

· No PowerPoint, NO POWERPOINT! We are not alone in thinking this way.

And, just for fun, the next time you have to attend or organize a meeting, after it’s over, send out a follow-up email to the attendees/client with a list of questions that were presented, what actually was resolved, and how much this meeting cost. Rest assured, half your 2017 meeting calendar will be cleared up soon.

Does your startup face the same problem? Share with us your thoughts or let us know if you have some tips for your 2017 Meeting Schedule. We at EcmaStack are always open to trying something new!