Embracing Alternatives to Meetings Will Make Your Business Move Faster

I promise that this is not yet-another-article broadly lamenting the horrors and abuse of meetings (particularly virtual) in the world of knowledge workers– we will get specific here and keep soapboxes safely tucked away. Traditional synchronous meetings/calls/etc. have their place and certainly aren't all bad.

I believe the overuse of meetings often delays three particular business processes:

1. Critical decisions, authorizations, or buy-in
2. Feedback on important work
3. Knowledge transfer/Learning

The delay starts with scheduling.

While “getting everyone together to jump on a call/Zoom/etc.” often feels like the quickest way to a decision, it’s almost always the opposite because of scheduling. Choosing this tactic usually creates a delay where we have now wait for a time when everyone can attend.

Delays are mainly caused by:

1. Schedule coordination particularly across time zones & factoring in travel, vacations, etc.
2. Individual meeting capacity and non-compressibility of meetings for each individual

How many times have you had to push a meeting into the next week, or several weeks, simply because one important person can’t make it until then?

Will everybody be "ready" for your meeting?

We also have to hope that everyone is going to understand the topic and be ready to turn around highly tuned feedback at that exact date and time, on the spot, altogether. How about attendees showing up late or flustered, “in back-to-backs all day”, answering the door, or playing Candy Crush in the background? How engaged will they be at that future time and date? Are you getting what you set out to get when you scheduled the meeting? Will this meeting spawn more meetings?

Here are some asynchronous alternatives to meetings for these specific business needs:

Scenario 1: Need a critical decision made or buy-in from a stakeholder. Share a collaborative doc with them containing the needed information using Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Which, hopefully, your organization is already using by now. Frame what you need and tee it up in the email notification when you share the document. Stakeholders can simply read the document, slides, diagram, or spreadsheet, then think about it, then reply to you with Yes or No. If they need clarification, they can use highly detailed commenting tools within the shared document to ask for clarification on exact points in the materials. This also works if multiple stakeholders need to give approval.

Scenario 2: You need feedback on important work. Largely the same solution as Scenario 1. But wait- do you need to “walk me through something”? Fine, then do it in Loom, Screencastify, or some other easily-sharable screencast tool. I’ll watch the video, maybe at 1.25x time, then get back to you with any clarification or feedback. Same applies to everyone you would have tied up in that meeting.

Scenario 3: Knowledge transfer/Learning. Need to “demo the software to me” or show me somewhere in the software the configuration that would work, or walk through several options? Again, do it as a screencast and send it to everyone. This is highly useful in sales, onboarding, training. Viewers can comment back on a collaborative doc or email after viewing the video on their own time, asynchronously. Bonus: this can be used over and over again in the future so you don’t have to keep repeating the same meeting.

Meeting after is still an option.

Still need to meet after all that? Fine, have a meeting– but then enjoy how much more productive that meeting is because you prepped everyone for it and thought through it via the async tactics above. Your meeting has now evolved into a highly focused exchange vs. getting everyone “up to speed” or “on the same page”.

Wait– this sounds like more work for me, the organizer?

You may have noticed that all three of these alternatives require more work for the organizer than simply calling a meeting. Yes, that’s true, at least on the surface. I suspect that’s one big reason why meetings are overused: because it’s less work for the organizer to just call a meeting (at potentially more cost to the organization). While you may have to prep a little more to set the table for asynchronous work, by now you understand that this work will keep you moving forward with the highest-quality feedback in the least amount of time.

This may take an institutional investment, but it's well worth it.

Sometimes the people who default to meetings the most simply lack the tools, skills*, or know-how to use other methods. This is easily solvable with training and consistent cultural reinforcement. Consider working these trainings into your next company off-site (a great type of meeting, by the way) or requiring online collaboration training for the organization. Building a culture around these tools and techniques will, I believe, pay handsome dividends in speed-to-value for most companies.

*including a staggering amount of adults (by my casual observation) who were never taught how to touch type. I don't know of any quick fix for this but it's a very handy skill.