Let’s make Meetings great again!
Gravity Meeting for better ways to communicate
Start-ups have to create everything from A to Z. There is no correct rule or guideline. Therefore it is more important and difficult than anywhere else to set the directions: that’s why it’s often called venture. What is the most needed to get direction is a clear understanding of what the team(organization) values most and regards as a priority. Usually, this is called ‘Vision’.
Just as people explore and define ‘the purpose of life’, the team expresses it using Vision. Because the Vision becomes the driving force of the team to move, most of the teams have a lot of efforts to build their Vision in the initial stage. However, it’s one thing to set the Vision, and it’s another to make it actually work.
So what does it take for the Vision to work as it’s meant to? The answer which we thought is communication. Communication could make the team members share values and direction which they think is right for the team. That is, communication can lead to team-wide consensus and rapport.
Also, communication makes a sense of belonging. This sense of belonging helps deepen our understanding of the roles of other teammates, the values they create, and how they contribute to achieving the team’s goals. This boosts the reliability in the team. Pleasure through conversation is a bonus. Pleasure leads to better performance.
To sum up, as consensus and a sense of belonging are made, at last, the meaning of ‘Vision’ comes up. When Vision works well, members can effectively handle unexpected issues that they encounter based on this Vision. For this reason, the team needs communication.
Pluto had sought for better ways to communicate among its teammates, and we came up with Gravity Meeting.
Dilemma of Growing Team
As teams grow in size, they might suffer this issue. There isn’t much chance to mingle with other teammates who’s most of the time not involved in your tasks. This holds, to some extent, for small teams as well.
Our team, Pluto also considered about the issue a few months ago. Various projects were launched and most communication was limited to project members. Communication with project members is important, yes, but that with other members is also needed for some benefits.
Why Should We Mingle with Various Team Members
1. Unexpected Inspiration
Conversation with diverse people gives new inspiration. New inspiration makes an unexpected spark. Unexpected spark invents ideas, which leads to a new trial. The trial makes an innovation.
2. Relationship for Further Project
Projects always end. Current projects don’t last forever. Nobody knows what your next project would be. Relationship with other team members makes the better progress of the next project with those members. Like Butterfly Effect, a little bonding at the moment may lead to a huge fruit in the future.
3. Understanding How The Team is Doing
The understanding of enterprise resource leads to the better decisions in each specific tasks.
Gravity Meeting
What is the Gravity Meeting?
We came up with this idea of Gravity Meeting to build such bondings between diverse team members. The name was inspired by “gravity assistance”, the use of gravity to accelerate a spacecraft, that is, to increase or decrease its speed or redirect its path. Gravity Meetings are small and unconstrained meetings that are for communicating to control direction and speed before we reach our target trajectory(Vision).
Ground rules
- Every other Monday, meeting groups are randomly organized.
- Each group has three or four members.
- One member for each group is randomly selected as an organizer, to be responsible solely for the actual gathering of the group.
- Groups hold the meeting within the two-weeks cycle. If not, the organizer has to explain the reason.
- It does not matter what time the meeting is held. It can go to lunch together or even during working hours.
- There is no topic for the meetings. Meetings are held in a relaxed state with whatever topics they want.
- It is recommended to meet for more than 30 minutes and less than 2 hours.
- Groups with remote workers have to use video calls.
We started October of the last year and have had about 10 meetings per person so far.
Through this meeting, we were able to get closer to each other and to make a new challenge. One example is that members who focus on different tasks had designed and developed mini-feature of Scinapse based on the ideas from this meeting.
One particular advantage is that it leads to more communication with remote workers. Most remote workers are likely to feel alienated. So every team which has remote workers is concerned about how to make a good environment for them. Gravity meeting is the way for us to solve this problem. This makes more value than communicating by voice calls or texts.
The value of “Transparency” has been applied not only to our service but on how we work. In that sense, this Gravity meeting which leads to open and free conversation is a great help.
Gravity meeting became very valuable team culture and we continuously try to make various activities for growing our team cultures. ‘Working shop’ in the last week of January is one such example. To greet the new year, we are planning a Working shop(Not Work-shop) for inspiring our passion. We will share epilogue after returning from the Working shop.
Pluto Network
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Scinapse: Academic search engine
Email: team@pluto.network
