Creating efficiencies in meeting process

Background

Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a shift in companies moving to more remote or hybrid based working environments leading to online or hybrid meetings and calls becoming the norm to solve problems.

Today, post-pandemic, even those in the office need to jump on calls or into rooms to interact around problem spaces that they used to discuss at a desk or over a coffee as colleagues, peers or clients are now operating more remotely. So, is this way of working efficient? Are there better ways to make the most of interactive time with colleagues and clients?

Everyone has to join meetings in their day to day work - regardless of level, role, position.

As you develop further your role in these meetings change.

Meetings have long been considered a drain on efficiency with many references to making sure there’s:

• Agenda
• Clear actions
• Solid outcomes?
• Strict limitation on numbers

As the trend towards hybrid working continues, we’ve all been forced into working in a more async way. Our toolsets have evolved and most companies now embrace chat tools: Slack, Teams, HipChat and Google Chat. Even Skype or Whatsapp have a place. Is the constant stop start of meetings creating a context-switching blockage in your teams? Could there be more of a process or guide to whether you needed a meeting at all?

Changes we’ve made

In the last two months, we’ve elected to move management conversations from a weekly recurring meeting, to having a [hold] in our calendars that can be used to rubber duck, complete admin tasks, review documents or assemble on a call. This [held] hour is determined by how much we have in the way of an agenda. We’re a management team, we talk all the time (through our private slack channel and various direct messaging channels) but pulling a meeting because it’s booked in on a regular cadence can create disruptive ripples in productivity in the team.

If something is outlined as an agenda item in our [hold] spot upfront, we have time to plan, think and prep for that meeting and determine whether or not it needs to be done face-to-face or async through our toolset.

In the first instance it was a trial. Could we drop that meeting? Should a management team drop that meeting? Are there any other touchpoints we could sync in instead? Of course there are. But let’s follow our own strategy here - test, learn and iterate.

In the weeks that followed, our Slack “agenda reminder” created a thread of topics we could decide to meet around or discuss in slack. The hold space became exactly that, sometimes used for ad-hoc 121 discussions on specific topics, sometimes opening space to address other tasks within the team(s). Gradually, we found that the meeting space was being used for a face to face meeting only around 25% of the time.

Impact

Putting that into real terms, and reflecting back, that suggests that 75% of the time, there’s around ￡1000* of effort in that meeting taking place unnecessarily.

Expanding that out in a similar way in project teams and more senior leadership discussions shows vast levels of opportunity cost wastage - let alone the hidden costs of context-switching between tasks interrupted that held concentration before the meeting and those that need immersion after the meeting.

How has this affected future thinking? Where possible, we openly welcome async discussions. We actively encourage meeting face to face where needed too. But the stimulus of face to face engagement is no longer based on a necessity to engage in conversation, it’s built around required outcomes to the meeting and the need for different parties to be involved.??

*calculated based on average opportunity cost of team members in this meeting per hour