A thing or two about productive meetings

If you work in a software development company as I do, there’s a fair chance you are not completely in love in the number of meetings you have on a weekly basis. There’s even a big chance you have stopped believing in the sole concept of the meeting. It has become a productivity-killer, a multi-threaded one as it would usually waste the time of more people than just yourself.

We’ve all been there!

Do not give up just yet. I‘d like to share with you what made meetings in my team better for us. Who knows, maybe you’ll be able to use some of it.

Short disclaimer: what worked for me, might not work for you. More so, you might’ve even tried it already and it has not worked. Different things work for different people. Share your thoughts in the comments!

When I’m invited to a meeting as a participant…

I have the right to know what is the purpose of the meeting and what’s expected from me.

Seriously, if you get invited to a meeting and you don’t know the purpose of it, find a person that is responsible for running the meeting and ask. Any of these can work:

“What do we want to achieve at the meeting? Knowing it will allow me to better prepare.”

“What’s the planned outcome of the meeting? How do you think can I contribute to achieving it?”

Additionally, even if the projected meeting outcome is well defined, you still need to understand how are you expected to contribute to it. If you feel like your skill set could be used in a better way somewhere else (e.g. by spending the time on coding instead of participating in a meeting) then the meeting is probably not the right place for you to be.

I have the right to say “no” to the meeting I don't feel I can contribute to.

Pretty clear, right? We trust each other in the team. If one of us claims they won’t help at the meeting — no matter whether the reason is being currently focused on coding or feeling like their skill set is not suitable to help at the meeting — they have the right to reject the meeting invitation. More so, we allow checking out in the middle of the meeting as well.

What I found during hours of meetings is that one person that is bored or distracted can spread the feeling to other participants, so it’s almost always better to let such person go and do things they’d rather do at the moment.

When I’m about to run a meeting…

I clearly state what is the goal of it.

If I was to leave you with just one remark after reading this article, let it be this one. How many times have you spent time at a meeting with no idea what you’re doing there? How many times have you been at the meeting which did not end with a sensible conclusion? There’s no reason to ask multiple people for their time just to sit down in a room and have a conversation leading nowhere (even if it’s pleasant).

tip #1

I assume you’re using a shared calendar to manage meetings. When you create a new meeting, you can set the meeting goal as the title (if there’s a single goal), e.g. “To choose the front-end technology for our new product” or “To get feedback about the new team process“. This will make sure invited people will read the goal at least once — when they open their calendar invitation.

I prepare the meeting agenda upfront (if possible).

If only it’s possible, I add meeting agenda to the calendar invite before the meeting, so that invited folks have more time to prepare and/or make an educated decision on whether or not to come. I feel like sometimes defining an agenda for a particular meeting doesn’t make sense, it’s better to just stop at writing down the meeting goals instead of defining agenda which we’ll never stick to at the meeting. Make a judgment call.

I make sure to invite only the parties that can help.

There’s no need to invite more than people you are expecting to help reach the projected outcome of the meeting. Sometimes it’s natural to just invite the whole team to a meeting that might actually involve only half of the team members, but there’s a fair chance it’s actually not the way to go.

tip #2

What works for me when I need to run a meeting within the team is inviting all team members, but marking everyone that I think might be less interested as optional. This way I allow them to judge for themselves. It’s more than fine for me if they join the meeting and do not contribute if their goal was just to be there and learn something. I treat it as a sign that they actually care about the team and their personal growth.

If you want results, come prepared.

This one goes to both meeting facilitator and other attendees. If you are joining a meeting, make sure to prepare. Do your reading, learning, research, whatever you can to ensure you’re best suited to ask and answer questions during the actual meeting.

tip #3

If you have trouble remembering about meetings and you usually don’t come prepared, try creating a calendar meeting just for yourself, for 15 minutes, just prior to the actual meeting. This way you’ll get the calendar reminder a bit more upfront + you’ll have time for doing your pre-meeting research as no one will be able to invite you somewhere else for the same hour.

One last thing…

Sometimes the best meeting is the one that didn’t happen. If you might not need a meeting at all, don’t run it. Try figuring out the answers yourself. Go to a person that can help you and fix your problem with a 2-minute conversation. If people in your team hate the number of the meetings, maybe you’re running too many of them?