Why weekly staff meetings are important in startups?

Weekly staff meetings are important for decision-making concerning all the company coordination needs in order to successfully secure business and build a stable 'operational core' - a set of procedures, workflows, and company policies that are constantly evolving as the company grows.

A newborn company needs to address the growing pains of setting a business from scratch. Cash is a top priority and this means that the company needs to find ways to be the most effective possible in doing whatever is needed to make money flow in and spend the less possible. The goal is to survive, to remain open for business as much as possible in order to reach those mid-term expected profits, everybody dreams about.

The startup founders and the first people to be hired in the company split into different sort of activities and the need for group coordination is quite frequent. Like in a human body, one hand needs to know what the other is doing and meetings are like the startup's brain, an excellent opportunity for all-hands coordination.

Normally, a number of persons are in charge of getting money in, while others will be in charge of the other business operations. This fundamental split between sales vs. operations is, from the start, a permanent source of tensions and conflicts. The way startups manage their first meetings is critical for establishing the future success of the company, as I will explain ahead.

Weekly vs. monthly

In a startup company, the weekly cycle is normally the first and more effective way to correct problems that constantly arise until reaching a stable ‘operational core’ in the exploit of the business.

The founders and the staff must learn to become a high-performing team. They collectively learn how to handle the business following a number of routinary procedures based on the decisions made in those early weekly meetings. The goal is to reach a stable set of operations where incomes are greater than outcomes allowing the startup company to grow full speed ahead.

After this early stage, a different kind of coordination needs emerge. There are still some important issues to be dealt with but they no longer require urgent and immediate action. Weekly all-hands staff meetings, which are costly, will tend to become shorter or more spaced and can be used instead to filter the issues that can be better addressed elsewhere.

However, if the startup has a huge growth challenge ahead, the sense of urgency is something that must always exist. Instead of weekly staff meetings, specific project teams will be charged with specific tasks and running successful meetings will always be important to the success of a startup.

Depending on the type of your core business operations, weekly staff meetings can remain themselves a part of the core operations. In small software-houses, new collaborative programming methods, like SCRUM, require daily stand-up meetings as part of the core operations. But most frequently these all-hands staff meetings tend to be spaced on a monthly basis and finally even to become just yearly staff meetings, ideal to conduct a yearly assessment and celebrate results.

Staff meeting logistics

It is important to have a dedicated space for hosting weekly staff meetings, but not necessarily a meeting room. You can set a circle of chairs in a common part of the office that will be all quiet as everybody will be dedicating time to the meeting. If the meetings are short you may simply have a stand-up meeting.

A set of rules needs to be decided about these weekly staff meetings, when, how, who should attend, who reports what, and who organizes, must be clear to all and form part of the company rules and policies. By definition, a staff meeting involves everybody in the company, however as the company grows it becomes impossible to have all the members of a remotely dispersed startup organization in a meeting without the use of video-conference. This lack of physical presence is normally associated with complains about meeting effectiveness at a distance. But some authors argue that technology can enhance the productivity of a meeting and that being face-to-face is no longer necessary thanks to new popular web conferencing tools like Zoom, GoToMeeting or JoinMe (cf. my previous article). These tools make possible what otherwise would be impossible and especially a startup will be easily drowned by the excess of travel expenses.

A critical element in any meeting is the recording of meeting notes. A paper flip-chart can be used or, if the startup company is digital from inception, a modern interactive display can be even more useful for note-taking (see video below). Latest browsers like Microsoft Edge are very useful for replacing paper flip-charts in face-to-face meetings. Moreover, popular office packages such as Office 365 and GSuite (the Office equivalent from Google) are ideally designed to be used in staff meetings where some of the participants are not physically in the same office because they have a built-in conferencing package like Skype-for-Business in the case of Office 365.

The meeting sphere

The present 4.0 digital revolution challenges a lot of work practices and coordination tools we have taken for granted. For instances, a number of growing voices argue that e-mail is obsolete and makes an organization less productive. In my case, in a mid-size company, whenever I accidentally respond to a message addressed to all, I immediately get a set of angry responses from my colleagues. This is understandable, everybody is oversaturated with e-mail and we all want to reduce it to a minimum.

Digitally sophisticated startups are replacing the use of e-mail with more advanced collaborative tools like Slack or Flock that can be used in mobile devices or desktops alike. These tools use the concept of social channels and cloud-shared documents to replace e-mail for team messaging, project management and other features that improve productivity and speed of execution, two critical requirements in any fast-growing business.

For small startups (and also for grown-ups with Slack enterprise grid) these tools are ideally suited to have all hands coordinated and reduce the need for weekly staff coordination meetings and their frequency. Can a startup company resist not having their staff to meet face-to-face?

The secret sauce

As I stated at the start of this article, the fundamental tension between sales and non-sales will be an enduring tension throughout the life of the company and the way initial staff meeting are addressed is important. As people learn to work together in a growing startup, they also must define a set of founding norms that make the whole group cohere and resist such permanent tensions.

Bruce Tuckman observed what happened when a group of individuals starts to work collectively as a group and he found that a number of previous stages must be overcome until reaching a steady productive stage.

As the founders of a startup start to work together a set of norms are created and a sense of group identity is formed that will be the bedrock of the future company culture. It is upon these set of shared values about work performance, business ethics, customer relations, staff performance appraisal, etc. that the performing organization will then evolve and grows.

Like a stable set of core operations, the startup must also acquire a stable company culture that becomes the 'personality of a company' as Alyson Doyle describes it in the article 'Understanding Company Culture'. This is important for any company but especially for a startup because the new hires are more likely to enjoy their time in the workplace when they fit in with the company culture. New staff members tend to enjoy work when their needs and values are consistent with those in the workplace and tend to develop better relationships with coworkers and are even more productive.

Staff meetings are also important to build and reinforce the company's culture. Indeed is a website where you can check opinions of people about the companies where they have worked in, and it is frequent to see comments like this when people leave a company for some reason:

More team meetings and events will be helpful. While everyone works together well it will be good to socialize more. It will be more fun and bring everyone closer.

Weekly staff meetings (or any meeting for that matter) must conclude in a manner that brings everyone closer and, why not, bringing also an element of engagement and fun.

My meeting facilitation tips

If you are a startup founder and your company is in the digital world, try to use an interactive display instead of a flip-chart. There are several options available from hype companies like Google, with JamBoard and now Samsung with Flip, but some models like CTOUCH would have a built-in Windows PC inside within the same price range.

Whenever you have a group of people assembled in front of a flipchart or a touch display you have also a community, eventually at the 'forming' stage. Any person that grabs a pen and start making annotations or diagrams in the display has a clear intention to assist the group in making clear some viewpoints or proposing an idea and therefore is assuming a 'facilitative' role.

The group normally accepts anyone within this 'facilitative role' because they are trying to get clarification on the issues being discussed and discussions are taking too long. Everybody hates wasting time in meetings.

However, trying to reach a conclusion fast and finish in a hurry can give an immediate sense of relief to participants but unsolved issues will come back with a vengeance. Chances are you and your team will be spending more non-productive time?afterward until convening the next meeting.

With this in mind, my advice to any 'would-be group facilitator' using an interactive touch display (or flipchart) is the following:

1. Impromptu prompts. If the meeting has already started and you simply need to facilitate some important discussion point using the touchscreen think of yourself as being a "servant" to the?group.?Kindly ask permission to all the participants (including the remote ones) before you take the pen to annotate on the shared screen. You can say something like this: "Hey, I see that some great ideas are being discussed here. Do you mind I would take the pen to help us all make better sense of them and reach a conclusion?". If everybody agrees, take the pen and lead the discussion. If anyone disagrees, you can ask for a chance. You can say: "just let me try to use the touchscreen to clarify things." If the meeting owner hesitates, you can always say "just let me try to see if this helps and if not I will seat back and others may try to do the same until we reach a good solution that serves the group."
2. Do important housekeeping before you start.?If you are planning to use a touchscreen from the start of a meeting, quickly?check the objectives of the discussion (what are we trying to achieve as a group?) and propose your plan to spend the time available. Review the existing agenda or if there is none write down the agenda with time allocation. Say, 10 minutes presenting alternatives, 20 minutes discussing pros and cons and 5 minutes for wrap-up and next steps. Ask for agreement and remind the group that "we can always make adjustments if?we see this agenda is not helping our goals".
3. Time keeping. This is the most neglected role in a meeting and at the start, you can ask if anyone would volunteer to be a time-keeper. You can share the agenda page with the time-keeper and ask her or him to interrupt and remind you all of time available when appropriate. The mission here would be to keep the group on time within the agreed agenda.
4. Think about visual metaphors for the group discussion.?The?Grove?consultants have a vast range of visual?tools?you might want to use, but there are a few others well suited for flip charts or touch screens. My favorite is Sam Kaner's diamond model, for reaching group closure. Start with the divergent phase of the meeting to generate ideas from the group. Then move to discussion phase, explicitly identifying the group criteria for selecting options.
5. Remain neutral.?Make sure you do not confuse your own preferences as a team member with the ones of the group you suppose to facilitate. Try to remain neutral and impartial. Whenever possible, you should simply help the group manage the different expectations that are happening:?"It seems some people are ready to move on to another topic.?How do others feel?"
6. Get shared agreements.?Finally, move to convergence and get the group to agree on a?joint outcome of the meeting. Invite the participants to resume the conclusions. Ask if anyone else wants to add something. Observe the group. If you notice something is wrong, you can ask permission to use a simple consensus check. "I am going to ask you to use your fingers to classify how you feel about this outcome. Use three or more fingers if you agree, use two fingers or less if you disagree but can live with this, use your fist if you cannot endorse this outcome." Then, run the show of hands. If there is no consensus and time available go back to discussion phase and clarify group criteria if not, adjourn the meeting and annotate results on the touchscreen. Use these notes for next meeting or following up.
7. Debrief the process.?One of the most interesting features of a touch display is that you can revisit the page or pages with the annotations made during the meeting. When you ask permission to take a seat invite the group to revisit the meeting notes by asking "Let's recap the process by looking at these notes and check how did we perform as a group. Is there any moment, in particular, you want to comment? How can we improve for next time?"?This step corresponds to the 'adjourning stage' in the stages of group performance and it is often neglected but if you aim for excellence in team performance, this is the best source of improvement areas.

Additional resources

• Toggle is a time tracking app that you can use in your meetings and they have written this useful white paper about what to do in each team development stage: https://toggl.com/stages-of-team-development
• The IAF (International Association of Facilitators) has a methods database that you can use in your meetings. https://www.iaf-world.org/site/pages/methods-database
• Robin is an office scheduling system that can be useful when space is limited it also offers interesting meeting productivity analytics: https://robinpowered.com/
• Digital Collab is a thought leadership community on digital tools for visual collaboration and group decision-making, join our group: https://www.dhirubhai.net/groups/8587277/