How to have a lot of calls and still have time to work
In the remote work era, team culture is more important than ever. I’m a proud manager of a team of eight — six of whom were hired during the pandemic — and together we completed a hundred design tasks in 2020. In this article, I’ll share tips for culture meetings, templates, and my experience with schedule optimization.
I believe that building a thriving team culture takes time and effort. The most important thing is for the process to be flexible so that everyone is comfortable and engaged.
Below is a screenshot of what my calendar looked like in August 2020: working meetings, status updates, and 1:1s. With so many meetings and events, it’s almost impossible to do your job, especially with the team waiting for your support. This was the exact week when I realized that something needed to be done about my excessive meetings, without losing the team dynamics that we had already cultivated.
A good team culture means that you work well together but also have time to work individually. Because many of us agree that we’d rather not have to attend meetings all day.
So let’s start with what you can do to support your team culture and dynamics while working remotely. And then we’ll se how you can optimise each of these meetings.
Daily meetings
My team starts every morning with a planning meeting, which we call a “Daily” within the team. It can be done in one of two ways:
- The first is to talk about topics unrelated to work, like sandwich recipes. We use this time as a regular office coffee break.
- The second is to discuss work, such as regular daily scheduling and status updates. Initially, we were more engaged when sharing recipes, so morning planning meetings were an excuse for us to wake up and talk about something among ourselves. But this January, we decided to try to make these meetings more organized. We put together an experimental meeting plan: Each person expresses their opinion about something, so that our meetings stayed organized and productive. After a week, we voted on whether or not to keep this method, but not a single person voted to continue working this way. It turned out that my team valued starting their day with a simple human conversation. And it worked the best for us.
Here are some tips when creating your own daily morning plannings:
- Keep the meeting under 15 minutes if your team is small. With automated reporting and a quick meeting to discuss projects and assignments, you can have more time for the work that matters. If there’s nothing left to discuss, cut the meeting short.
- If you decide to focus your morning planning meetings on work, then choose this option if it’s important for you to control the daily workload and how it changes depending on what your team is doing. But still try to start with icebreakers and small talk, so your team will have a more pleasant start to their day. It’s easy and makes a huge difference.
Weekly planning meetings
The next activity we do is weekly planning. It can also be done in two ways:
- The first is to set up a team dashboard and have everyone share what they’re working on. This is effective if you have a small team and few projects. But if your team has more than three people, discussions can take up too much time and be unproductive.
- Now that our team is bigger, we’ve been practicing an approach in which each person takes turns sharing what they worked on last week, what they plan to do this week, and any challenges they’re facing. Try to schedule meetings with your manager prior to ones with your team, so you can share important news and upper management’s expectations. This helps your team get a better understanding of what’s expected of them for the current week.
Retrospectives
The next type of weekly activity is a retrospective, a meeting that summarizes the week’s results. My team considers retrospectives to be the most useful meetings, because we get to celebrate our successes or console each other on things that didn’t turn out as planned.
Initially, we did presentations in our retrospectives every week — with a general topic to add some humanity to our reports. On each slide, the person described three tasks, three areas that could be improved, and three good things that happened. For example, one of the topics we had was potatoes. Everyone talked about their favorite potato dish and how they spent their time this week.
Small social activities like these helped fill the void of our Friday bar trips and joint meetings, but then we realized how much time we spent on preparing slides. Since we could be as creative as we wanted, some of us cut designs out of paper and others drew detailed pictures and storyboards — what usually took a few minutes ended up dragging on for hours.
We changed up our format and now have one presentation that we use every week. Each person only has their own slide to ask the team questions. We also divided the presentation: One slide to share work-related items and one to share something personal. Also, there’s a designated slide for our “GIF of the week.”
Recently we changed the form of our retrospectives again, but it’s a topic for another story.
Note: You can take stock not only once per week, but also for other important events, such as the start of a new year. We came up with an award ceremony where each person on the team received an award, ceremonial slide, and diploma. Don’t be afraid to use retrospectives to get your party going!
Project syncs
Design projects are also a great source for creating an internal work culture and a sense of who we are.
For example, we once had a project where we made designs for socks. One member of the team showed a design sample and drew a glass of champagne with her name.
It quickly became an inside joke, which goes to show that regular meetings can help create a work culture unique to your team.
What to keep in mind
The most important thing in planning and coming up with team meetings is democracy. When you try to implement a new team activity, keep tabs on how the team reacts to it. For example, when we did reports for each week, one person refused to do it, as it was time consuming. It was this person who came up with the new retrospective format idea, which became an excellent way out of the situation.
Traditional 1:1
I do 1:1s with my team once per month. These meetings are flexible and the agenda depends on what my team wants to discuss, which could be anything from personal development and team dynamics to any challenges or feedback. We stay away from discussing our current projects, since we have other meetings dedicated to those.
Weekly checkups
Every team member also has a 15-minute checkup with me every week. These meetings are for discussing particular projects, weekly plans and workload. It actually works really well for us, because we can stay concise and organised and will not need a full one hour meeting every week.
Onboarding
Six new hires joined my team in 2021. When you’re adding new hires to your team, automate the onboarding process to ensure they start off on the right foot. That is, have a form or presentation ready for every new hire: Record a video, set up a project management system, and come up with a new automated project. Try to remove yourself from the process as much as possible so that the new hire can get up to speed faster
You can also distribute different stages of onboarding between team members, because every team has experts in different areas. Have the new hire meet with as many people as possible so they can understand what other teams are responsible for and get a bigger picture of how the organization operates. But remember to communicate with the new hire, as it can be scary joining a company as a newbie!
During a new hire’s first two weeks, we meet with them three times per week and reduce that number by one every other week. Usually by around the one-month mark, they’ve settled in.
What to keep in mind
Remember that these meetings aren’t for you, but for your team. Try to give them complete freedom as to whether to cancel these meetings, postpone, or change their durations — because your job as a manager is to support your team.
Delegate
Take notes on what each team member’s strengths are, and delegate tasks accordingly. Before, all requests would be sent to me directly and I’d redistribute them to the rest of my team. This proved to be time consuming and confusing, so we streamlined our request distribution process and made sure that the assignee actually had the bandwidth to take on new projects. We also built a shared team dashboard, which provides an overview into everyone’s current workloads.
Skip the unnecessary stuff
Ask whether or not you need to attend a meeting if you don’t feel that it’s crucial to. Try to be cognizant of what kind of meetings you go to and skip the unnecessary ones — especially if your team needs your help.
Color-code your calendar
Color-coding was my savior; it helped me realize what I spend the most time on and why my calendar used to be so chaotic. For example, all of my team meetings are in red, regular calls in green, 1:1s in yellow, and my personal appointments in purple. Blue is for time that I block out to do uninterrupted work.
Overall, color-coding will help you visualize how you typically fill out your calendar. And then you can see how you spend your time and optimise your meeting accordingly.
Distribute team meetings throughout the week
You may have noticed that I have many different team meetings in succession. On the one hand, it’s convenient to schedule. Let’s say you decide to talk to every team member on Monday. But it takes a lot of effort and energy to solve each of their challenges, and you’ll get burnt out. If you spread out these meetings throughout the week, you’ll have enough energy to talk with each team member and be productive for the rest of the day
Use one Zoom link
If you have meetings scheduled back to back, you can save a lot of effort jumping from room to another by using the same Zoom link. This also helps the other person from going over the allotted meeting time, as they’ll know that the next person will be joining the room soon.
Find someone to talk to
Try to find support in another manager or partner. Treat yourself how you treat your team and be mindful of your mental well-being.
If you give up, everyone else will, too
You can set up as many meetings and activities to maintain your team culture as you want. But if you don’t want to go to them, no one will, either. Do what you believe in and take care of yourself.
Everyone’s situations and circumstances are different while working from home. If one of your team members doesn’t want to take part in your fun activities, don’t be discouraged. This is normal. You can check up on them and support them as best you can.
Choose team building activities that will help replace the fun outings that we can’t do while working remotely. For example, when we hire someone new, we invite them to a virtual coffee break and chat about anything other than work. Because that’s what we usually do in the office.
Listen to your team members and be empathetic, and give them enough time to rest so they don’t burn out. Remember that a happy team is a productive team.
And most importantly, take care of yourself before taking care of others. If you’ve been sitting at your desk for six hours and still haven’t eaten, get up and take a break! Being a manager is tough but rewarding — and I’m positive that you have all the tools to succeed.
