Hunting Meeting Fatigue Down
Collection of recipes for making communication more effective.
We published this article internally after COVID-19 broke out and forced People.ai, just like many other companies, to switch fully to a “work from home” mode. With the new reality of remote work, we expectedly started seeing more meetings on people’s calendars. The following guidelines were written in an effort to ensure our meetings stay useful and productive. The guidelines are company-wide but written from the perspective of an engineer.
Summary
- Writing improves our thinking.
- The way we make decisions can be improved by writing down the problem’s context and communicating the context before the meeting.
- More thoughtful feedback and diverse opinions might be provided if people are collaborating on a doc asynchronously.
- Inform what the meeting is about by adding an agenda.
- A meeting invite is not an obligation. Skip or leave meetings where you are not adding much value.
What is wrong with the current approach
Focus. Quite a popular word these days. We are all focused on achieving our goals.
What is the best way to achieve our goals? Act in the right direction. Acting is quite straightforward when you know what to do. Knowing what to do — this one is a puzzle, and cracking it requires creativity. Creativity loves time. Uninterrupted time.
It takes time, as well, for your teammates to understand the context and think about the puzzle. Look from other perspectives, ask additional questions, explore new ideas. They need time as well, yet we are often trying to pack everything into a 30–60 minute meeting with the hope to make good decisions by the end of it. More often than not, people will not get a chance to prepare for constructive conversations ahead of the meeting, as calendar invites often have quite an abstract title. And, even worse, no agenda.
Sometimes we include more people than needed and then discuss minor details not relevant to everyone. A lot of us are introverts and will not speak up. Due to time differences and other obligations, people are often having hours of back-to-back meetings. They will be tired before the conversation even begins.
As a result, instead of pleasure from speaking and working with the smartest people, we often feel pain. I hate pain, so I have spent some time figuring out how other teams are running this process, and here is what I found and started doing myself.
Structure Thoughts Better By Writing Them Down
When faced with a complex problem, I often materialize my thoughts in a doc. The immediate gain is not getting back to the point I thought through already, but moving further and discovering new ideas.
To make sure I can see the forest for the trees, I add a simple structure to the doc. Here is what I would cover when thinking about a non-trivial issue:
- Context
- Problem
- What will happen if the problem is not fixed
- Proposed solution
It doesn’t matter how good you are with writing as it will help by structuring your thought process. No one is a great writer initially. It takes practice.
Engineering and Data Science departments in People.ai have introduced the process of writing design docs, which forces us to think about the problem from different angles and make sure we are not missing important things like Costs or Build vs Buy analysis. This process also invites our colleagues to collaborate, contribute, feel included, and take on co-ownership of the solution.
More on the topic — Improving Your Writing Will Improve Your Thinking
I often structure docs in a Q&A manner when discovering or explaining complex domains.
Make Discussions More Efficient By Moving the Initial Phase Offline
You did a decent job of expressing your thoughts in writing, now use it as a springboard to get others to your level of context: share the doc! Most people will be thankful that you are respecting their time — instead of calling a meeting and narrating the problem, you allow them to read it through when it is convenient. You will also get more meaningful feedback as people will have more time to think through and consider the problem. Other companies have created similar best practices:
- Amazon is famously starting all of their senior leadership meetings by reading through detailed problem-solution write up. PowerPoint decks are banned.
- Square has moved one step further — they believe that commenting on the doc during the meeting is a good way to hear from those who usually stay silent or being (unintentionally) talked over.
Not all of the meetings will benefit from this. 1–1s and regular team gatherings do not have the goal to solve complex puzzles. Also while dealing with emergencies you just don’t have time to write things down.
Add an agenda to the meeting invite
By having goals stated explicitly, we move one step closer to reaching them. We can track that we are not derailing the conversation.
Meeting attendees will know about its intent, either prepare upfront or skip if they have more important things to do.
Lots of interesting thoughts on improving meetings efficiency can be found online.
Should I join this meeting?
For a good reason, the organizer might add more people than is necessary. How do we make sure that only relevant people are part of the discussion? Let every participant decide, it should be fine to skip and provide the reason.
If a meeting agenda is in place or problem write-up is shared upfront people can know if it makes sense for them to join and make an informed decision.
Leaving a meeting when you are not adding a substantial contribution is totally fine, everyone would understand that you can add more value to shared goals by doing other things.
Can this meeting be a Slack message or a conversation within a Jira ticket?
Can you effectively convey your point and get the necessary response by sending a Slack message or by commenting on a Jira ticket? If the answer is “Yes,” DO NOT call a meeting.
Basecamp claims they have 98% of conversations happening asynchronously, which allows people to work on their schedule, thus boosting overall performance.
Structuring our thought process better, hearing diverse sets of opinions, and having deeper conversations will help us make better decisions and reach our shared goals faster.
What else can we improve? What works and what not for you? What ideas would you like to try? Please comment and let’s start a conversation.
