Some time ago I wrote about frequency of team meetings. That’s one thing to know how often you waste the time of the team but another thing is to limit negative impact meetings have on everyday work.
Rules to remember when you organize a meeting.
• Keep it fairly short. You waste not only your time, but all of people who are invited. 20 people on 1-hour meeting? It equals half of a workweek of one of your developers. No, throwing a joke or two isn’t banned but don’t let the meeting pupate into a party or a lunch break.
• Information flow is the king. There’s only one reason to make meeting – exchanging information. Information is the most valuable resource in any company. It must be. Other way, information flow would just work and we wouldn’t be surprised every day: “Have we just promised that thing to the customer? How come? Anyone wanted to tell me that?” When you run a meeting and waste time of several people make sure everyone who can be interested is invited. When information concerns whole team, everyone is invited. When it is a project status meeting, take all people who are involved. When you’re going to play office wars, keep it exclusive for board of directors.
• Be on time. Maybe it is a surprise but being a manger you shouldn’t be 5 minute late. That’s not in good form. If you expect others to be on time, keep the rule yourself too. When you’re on time you can expect everyone else will follow. And they will as soon as they see you care to give an example.
• Know when to stop the conversation. It just happens – people start talking about technology and they suddenly discuss their holidays or new secretary’s haircut, or go down do deep details where heads of most of attendees just blow off. Someone should have stopped that a couple of minutes before. Someone should have been aware the meeting has been going in that direction. Is that possible you are that someone?
• Know when to end the meeting. If you were on meetings when either the silence rules the room when no one else has anything more to add or on those where people all over the place start chatting about different things rather loosely connected with the subject you know someone wasn’t able to end the meeting when it was time. And it really has nothing to do with meeting room reservation time. Meetings, you know, they sometimes die before they were planned to do so.
• Reserve resources. Oh, when we’re on the meeting rooms… Very often reserving the room for needed time isn’t so easy, but cutting agenda by a half just because there was only half-hour slot in the room schedule doesn’t really help with running the whole thing smoothly. Sometimes you just have to make some concessions for, well, things like rooms.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Pawel — I only recently discovered your blog, but I’ve really been enjoying reading through your articles. This one, and your other on the frequency of team meetings especially resonate. While good communication between team members is essential to project success, spending time in meetings is time we’re not producing product. Finding the balance is tricky.
We thought about this issue a lot when designing JuggleMyStuff. Our experience has been that the more transparent we can make a project, the fewer meetings we need to keep everyone on the same page.
Getting back to your points, there are times when a meeting is really the best way — for example, to brainstorm or work through some complicated, multi-faceted issue(s). And I totally agree with your suggestions. One thing I would add is requiring an agenda –preferably sent before the meeting. That way, everyone comes with the same understanding of the purpose and stays on track.
Thanks,
Andy Sells
CEO, Jugglesoft
Yes, I missed that one: preparing and executing the agenda helps everyone to start at the same point, helps to keep the track and not to lose some important points which were to be discussed.
Thanks for appreciating the blog.