Quarterlies, Huddles, Rounds, Masterclasses, 360s & Slack: Disrupting the meeting in Research Services
The Research Services (RS) division has undergone significant change over the past few years, including an expansion of our services and the number of colleagues supporting them. Like many areas of the Library, we’re always seeking ways to streamline our methods and processes to increase our efficiency as we work — often at near or full capacity — to support our customers and stakeholders. Since 2016 we’ve tried out a few different ways of facilitating communication and support, including different styles of meetings, so I thought it could be useful to share our experiences.
Moving away from ‘meetings’
In March 2017, we swapped offices with Marketing and Communications, moving from Blue 1.1 to the Red corridor. As with all changes, the move presented both opportunities and challenges. The new office layout offered smaller workspaces with less noise, which better supported focused work, and larger communal spaces for collaboration. We were conscious that the potential flipside to this could be more segregated and isolated working, reducing opportunities for exposure to colleagues’ approaches and experiences. To try to counter this, we adopted some Agile methodology, which includes renaming ‘meetings’. Of course colleagues need to meet to discuss issues and make decisions, but there’s a sense that the word ‘meeting’ carries with it unhelpful baggage of stuffy, inefficient formality. We therefore made the decision to rebrand our ‘meetings’, including our main divisional get-together, which was re-introduced as the Research Services Quarterly. We’re still working to ensure the format of our Quarterlies matches the intention behind moving away from describing them as ‘meetings’, but so far we’ve made the following successful changes:
- Themed approach to Quarterlies focusing on big issues such as open research, responsible metrics, research impact, etc
- Introduced a more discursive, interactive style to encourage all team members to share ideas, opinions and areas of concern, instead of previous focus on verbal or written service updates presented primarily by service leads
- Inviting external expert speakers to broaden our understanding of key issues
- Light-touch follow-up summary focusing on decisions and actions instead of minutes
The Rounds
We had a big shake-up of our Open Access service in 2016, moving to a mediated deposit model where we did a lot more work on behalf of authors than we had previously. The increased pressure on our services led us to pilot a more structured method of support to maximise sustainability. Previously, colleagues had sought support from service leads whenever a need arose, which led to regular interruptions and delays. Our proposed solution was protected time each day when service leads would meet with colleagues to discuss issues which had cropped up. In the early days, the service leads would move round the office visiting each colleague at their desk, and we nicknamed the slot ‘The Rounds’ as we felt a bit like doctors visiting patients!
The Rounds allowed colleagues to feel secure that they would have contact with a service lead every day, meaning they could pause on any tricky problems and proceed with more straightforward tasks. It also allowed colleagues to learn from each others’ experience, and facilitated collaborative decision making on unusual or undocumented situations. People also reported valuing the social element of The Rounds — it was a regular time to check in and have some face time with colleagues during a busy day working in separate offices.
Staffing changes in the division meant that we made the decision to end The Rounds in mid-2018. Even with just one service lead managing The Rounds, this still required a commitment of 2.5 hours per week, which was becoming unsustainable: we needed a rethink.
Slack
We decided to reintroduce Slack, which we had piloted as part of our new OA workflows in 2016. If you’ve not yet encountered Slack, it’s a really handy collaboration tool which facilitates discussion and sharing of documents and information. You set up a central account for your division or team, and then create channels for different aspects of your work. Colleagues can join as many channels as they need, to follow and contribute to conversations. You can @ specific colleagues to ensure they’re notified of important messages, set reminders to discuss or check things, and we find it much easier to check back on previous decisions or issues by searching in Slack than trawling through emails. Colleagues are encouraged to note any issues or concerns in the designated Slack channel as they go about their work, and service leads (or fellow team members) can provide suggestions or answers at a convenient time, again avoiding interruptions or delays to work. Following a Leadership Development Network (LDN) session in visible leadership, I’ve combined my Slack support with protected time each day to be available for face-to-face discussion of enquiries or tasks, to strike a balance between team members feeling supported and my other commitments. This seems to be working well.
Weekly huddle
Another Agile approach we’ve adopted (and, it must be noted, pinched from Marketing!) is a stand-up meeting in our Red corridor at the start of the week. We have whiteboards for Scholarly Communication and Research Data Management services, and each service area meets for 30 minutes to plan for the week ahead. Colleagues report on the current state of each service based on our agreed Service Level Agreements (SLAs) — we use a traffic light system for easy, visual signs of any problems — and on non-service work commitments, allowing us to work out who is at full capacity, and who might have some additional capacity, to allocate resource as best we can. In my opinion, it’s taken a while for these huddles to become really effective, as we had to get used to talking about our workload, commitments and capacity in ways we hadn’t before. We’d sometimes get bogged down on detail whilst losing sight of the main focus: can we do everything we need to do this week? What changes do we need to make to achieve our aims? But in recent months I’m finding these huddles really effective. We also incorporated emojis to our boards to allow colleagues to share how they’re feeling throughout the week — happy, stressed, down, sick etc — and we take collective responsibility to respond if we spot that a colleague’s emoji has changed from a positive to a negative face, checking in, offering support, chocolate, etc to try and help.
Metrics 360
Charlotte Pinder, Bibliometrics Support Assistant, explains another style of ‘meeting’ introduced by the Metrics service: “In the Research Metrics Team, we have replaced the standard meeting format with a weekly ‘360’. The idea of the 360 is to reflect on the previous week and to plan our work for the upcoming week. The reflection takes place during the first fifteen minutes of the meeting and as well as looking back in terms of our service, we also discuss any developments that have happened in the wider ‘Metrics world’. We also bring interesting tweets, blog posts or news articles that we have seen, to generate discussion. This helps to contextualise our work in the broader Research Metrics landscape. The 360 has more of a relaxed feel than a traditional meeting format, facilitated by using a collaborative space. We also use the collaborative tool Trello, instead of having a minute taker. Within Trello, every member of the team can log into the tool and document notes and actions on the team board, which enables us to collectively organise and prioritise our work.”
Monday Mini Masterclasses
In October 2018, I introduced another short get-together at the start of the week: short (max. 30 min) masterclasses to allow colleagues to share handy workplace skills and knowledge. There’s so much tacit knowledge in our team (and, I imagine, in every team) — on doing cool things in Excel; speeding up ways of working in Outlook and Word; and building confidence when planning work or communicating online, etc — that I wanted to try out a forum which would allow us to learn from each other to benefit ourselves and the Division. At the time of writing we’ve had 18 Masterclasses and colleagues are continuing to attend and put forward ideas for future sessions, which suggests these are successful and valued. We’ve invited colleagues from other areas of the Library who have expert knowledge to deliver particular sessions, which has been great for building relationships across teams, and I was delighted when DTS decided to pilot their own version of the Masterclass in March 2018. You can find out about upcoming sessions and access notes from past sessions via Library Connect, and colleagues from other teams are very welcome to come along if there’s a topic of interest.
The return of the meeting
I’m ending this blog post with a sense that, in some ways, we’ve come full circle in RS: we’re about to reintroduce service meetings! Yes, traditional, relatively formal meetings that are simply called meetings. We’re retaining the other forums I’ve mentioned above — the weekly huddles; Slack etc — but our managers have identified a need for regular service meetings alongside these more innovative approaches to support and discussion. Our weekly huddles are very operational, and our Quarterlies are very strategic and broad in scope, which means, Goldilocks-style, we need something that’s a ‘just right’ balance of both. In the Library we’re increasingly encouraged to be risk tolerant — to try things out, take risks, and not consider things as failures if you need to change course — and I feel proud of our efforts to innovate, make best use of our time and support open discussion and collective decision-making in RS. I have a feeling that the confidence, accountability and openness colleagues have gained through our exploration of alternative forums will mean our service meetings will be more dynamic and effective than they were in the past.
