Meetings, meetings, meetings

Today I wanted to talk you about Meetings. Our world is heavy on meetings, we organize a meeting for nearly everything. If you have to catch up with somebody: Why don´t we do a meeting for this? We´ve got Scrum meetings, we´ve got 1-2-1 meetings, we´ve got meetings to talk about meetings and we attend to meetings that we don´t know what they will be about.

Are meetings required?

Yes, for sure. Sometimes we need to talk about some issue or anything with a bunch of people. We could send instant messages or we could use slack or email to communicate with those people, but normally the best way is to schedule a meeting with them.

Agile methodologies are heavy on meetings because Agile is about reacting quickly to change, and therefore the only way to get together and talk about the change is to do a meeting.

Are meetings efficient?

Well, sometimes, but some meetings are far from being efficient.

Have you ever started a meeting and a great amount of the attendees were talking for 15 minutes about football, TV shows or similar stuff?

Don´t get me wrong, talking about football is required, chilling out with your colleagues is required as well. But are meetings the right place to do that?

Have you ever attended to a meeting and by the end of the meeting there were no actions or goals? You went out and you didn´t have a clue about the topic of the meeting or what it was about, except talking about random things.

Imagine a meeting with 7 attendees, the meeting takes about an hour. If we don´t make it efficiently, we are basically wasting 7 hours for nothing. It´s not only a waste of time and resources, it´s not only the the time spent in the meeting, it´s also the time afterwards to go back to what you were doing before the meeting.

The thing goes even worse when the meeting is attended by remote participants…

I always wonder why even big companies have this problem and they don´t have a well established procedure for meetings.

Meetings… can´t live with them, can´t live without them. If we need meetings, and we don´t make them efficiently, let´s make them efficient. It´s all common sense, it should be about setting some goals with the right people.

You need to organize a meeting

Let´s imagine I need to arrange a meeting. Let´s see what steps should I follow.

Before the meeting

Yes, it´s not only about creating an outlook appointment, but I also need to get ready for the meeting.

• Prepare a set of topics to cover in the meeting. If we see that the topic is very big to be covered, we can break that into smaller chunks.

• Send start time, place, duration. It may seem obvious but sometimes we forget to set a place for the meeting. If we´ve got remote participants, please send connection details, is it Hangouts, phone, skype, which account should they call, do they have an VC room they can join?

Don´t guess the duration of the meeting. Once you´ve got the points to cover, you can estimate a duration for every of them, let´s say we´ve got 3 points and we let 15 minutes for every of them. In my opinion, meetings lasting more than hour should be broken into more meetings or having a break (Please avoid those all-day-long meetings).

• Send the agenda to all of the attendees. You can also send additional information so they can get ready for the meeting. Do they need to know about a given issue? Do they need to research or think on possible ideas or plans? Ideally everybody should know about the topics or issues and come with actions or ideas to solve it.

• Please go some time in advance to the meeting room to check the equipment to be use, if there´s any issue, if the remote attendees are to be participating, call them in advance. A meeting starting with 10 minutes delay trying to launch the VC is a waste and it´s the worst possible start because people will start disengaged.

During the meeting

• Start with a brief introduction, why are we here.

• Take one of the topics and start with it.

• Please take care of the timing we decided for every point. If somebody is talking about some important issues but it´s not exactly to topic we were supposed to deal with, we can kindly say: Excuse me, let me take note of that to talk about it after the meeting, let´s go back to the point. Of course a meeting can take a bit longer that expected, but this should be an exception and that should be done with common sense. A timer can help with that.

• When the topic is covered, take note of the actions and people that take over it. All that is written in the meeting´s diary.

• Go through all of the topics. By the end of the meeting I should send the diary and action points to the attendees.

After the meeting, follow up

It´s also quite common to see meetings without follow up. Let´s take it back: we have made use of 7 hours of valuable time. The meeting was arranged to try to achieve something or to decide how to solve an issue. If we finish the meeting and we don´t follow up the action points, the issue is yet there.

Please arrange a follow up meeting, maybe 15 days after the original one. That meeting should start by going through the action points and checking about the state of those.

Wait, I´m just attending the meeting

Ok, but you are responsible for the success of the meeting as well.

First obvious question you should ask: why do I need to attend the meeting? Do I need to be there? Sometimes we invite random people, or people just-in-case. It´s ok to say: I don´t think I´m required in that meeting

Once you´ve got a meeting request, we must make sure that all the points above are met, as if you were organizing the meeting:

• If you haven´t received any topics in the appointment, please ask for them.

• If you need more details to get ready for the meeting, please ask for it.

• If in the middle of the meeting you notice that it strays from the original topics, please kindly ask to go back to it.

• If you are to be championing some of the actions and you haven´t received it, please ask for it.

Sometimes meetings with a general topic or a regular catch up without a bounded context are required. That´s fine but always try to break it down or being more specific. Because if we don´t know what the meeting is about, how can we expect the meeting to be efficient.

I hope these notes are useful and I´m looking forward to your comments or useful tips for meetings.