How to keep your team up to date without boring them to death
Or: “how we stopped doing company wide meetings altogether to keep our sanity”.
This is the first article of a series I’d like to call “Startup Advice: I have no idea what I’m doing, but here’s what we’re trying!”
When my co-founder Hongli and I started our company back in 2008, it was fairly easy to do meetings between the two of us: we’d simply schedule a time and place to meet for lunch at a local spot. During lunch, we’d discuss our progress and plans for the company and would go about executing it. A few weeks later we’d repeat the whole process again, and this worked out okay for a while.
When Tinco joined our company as our first employee however, things started to change a little. More specifically, communication between the three of us could take place in 1 of 3 ways, namely between:
- Hongli and I.
- Hongli and Tinco;
- or Tinco and I.
Keeping everyone in the loop on the outcome of these 1-on-1’s would usually require all of the above scenarios to take place; the total number of communication channels required for “total meeting coverage” subsequently grew from 1 to 3. This is something you might have instinctively already guessed: 3 people, so 3 communication channels doesn’t sound all that weird right?
When our second employee Goffert joined our company however, the number of possible communication channels grew even more, namely between:
- Hongli and I;
- Hongli and Tinco;
- Hongli and Goffert;
- Myself and Tinco;
- Myself and Goffert;
- Tinco and Goffert.
Where 2 people only had to deal with 1 communication channel, we now found ourselves in the situation where 4 people resulted in 6 communication channels. Apparently, the communication overhead here seems to grow faster than the number of people added.
And its effects were palpable: even though our team had only grown slightly, meetings took significantly longer to complete. Suddenly, we needed to start wondering how or if this approach would actually scale as we added more employees.
Generalizing the Overhead
If you’re familiar with Graph Theory, then the aforementioned should sound an awful lot like a complete graph. Without going too deep into it, this means that for n people in your team, the number of communication channels within that team is n(n-1)/2.
If math wasn’t your favourite subject in school, don’t worry: the main take away from the example above is to show you that for every team member you add to your internal communications, it’ll increase the overhead much more dramatically.
For a small team of 13 people for example, the number of communication channels that need to be maintained for “complete coverage” is 13(13–1)/2 = 78. Now imagine that each of these communication channels represents a 1-on-1 talk between co-workers that takes place in a weekly manner. Now imagine that each talk takes about 30 minutes, and you’ll find that on a weekly basis, you will have spent 78 * 0.5 = 39 hours on communication. That’s basically a 1.0 FTE out of these 13 employees!
It was exactly this level of growth in overhead that was starting to make meetings within our company soul crushing. Our approach didn’t help much either as well: very much like the example above, we held mandatory 30 minute team meetings on every Monday where we’d go over each and everyone’s progress/activity.
And as interesting as it was to hear everyone’s progress and opinions, it was also starting to eat away at the time we wanted to spend on creating awesome software products rather than just talking about it. When I started seeing people yawning and wanting to rush through the meetings (and me not being able to blame them), that’s when it finally hit me:
Not every employee should be forced to know everything about the company on a schedule.
Instead, they should be given the option to identify and consume the information most relevant to them, when it’s most relevant to them.
In hindsight, this should have been so painfully obvious, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In our efforts to make as much information within our company available to our employees, we were oblivious to the fact that we were starting to force feed them everything via these mandatory meetings rather than let them focus on what was relevant to them and their activity. Does a sales person absolutely need to know how DevOps went that week for example, and vice versa? Probably not. Some competencies are just too disjoint to cover with one swath of paint.
So how did we solve this for our company?
Three (in hindsight) easy steps to reduce company meeting overhead:
- Stop doing company wide meetings with mandatory attendance: if your employees can’t even recall most of the highlights discussed in such a team meeting after 1 day, then you have literally wasted time.
- Encourage smaller team meetings: by reducing the number of people involved in a meeting, everyone can speak their mind within a reasonable time frame and fully engage in the conversation. You do run the chance however of running into an echo chamber, and that’s why we also need step 3.
- Broadcast company achievements and decisions (made at #2) through an internal newsletter, but provide opportunities to follow up on items in a 1-on-1 manner via email/IM/phone/IRL.
By providing it in a newsletter format, people are able to contribute and consume news items in an asynchronous way and focus on the pieces they find most relevant to their role within the company.
The written form factor also forces people to carefully think about what they want to share. Brevity and a to-the-point style of writing is encouraged as a result.
By allowing feedback to be given on the newsletter through asynchronous discussions via IM/E-mail/phone/in person meetings, your team will be able to combat the echo chamber effect in a more efficient manner.
We’ve been running this approach for a few weeks now, and even though it’s too early to tell whether or not this is the solution to all our meeting woes, we can already see some big improvements over the previous approach. Especially when it comes to efficiency and employee happiness.
