Meetings are notorious. And we all know why. We’ve all been in meetings that are a waste of time at best and actively destructive at worst. But there are meetings that are valuable. In order to make the best use of everyone’s time, we must be deliberate about when we meet and why.
Meetings are a very expensive use of time. Of course, there is a direct cost to the company (the cost of all meeting participants’ time). But there are also more subtle costs — meetings break up your day in a way that makes it hard to get into flow, focus, and get the most important priorities done. Meetings also — like gas expanding to fill a room — tend to take up as much time as you allot for them, even if a full hour (or 30 mins, or whatever) isn’t necessary. A meeting-filled day can be soul-crushing if the meetings aren’t valuable — it drains your energy and joie de vivre.
Our default is always that a meeting should not exist rather than that it should exist. A meeting is guilty until proven innocent — especially standing / recurring meetings with many people, because these tend to be the most time-expensive and the least productive. Most standing meetings can be replaced with asynchronous communication and one-off meetings on a specific topic. If we have a strong Operating Model, Goal Setting, and Execution and adhere to How We Communicate, we should need far fewer meetings.
So, when then is the right time to have a meeting? What sorts of meetings should we have? There are four things that we should be seeking to achieve with meetings (although these can also be achieved asynchronously often). They form the acronym DACT:
These DACT goals will be met with either one-off specific meetings (for decisions) or recurring meetings that are either of the following:
It is important that each meeting have a designated Meeting Lead, who is sometimes, but not necessarily, the group’s manager. This person is responsible for making the meeting run well, which also means ensuring that all meeting participants submit their updates and issues in writing in advance and show up on time. The Meeting Lead must be ruthless about sticking to the timeline and, whenever something off-topic comes up, they should note it but schedule the discussion for another time. Without an effective Meeting Lead, meetings quickly become inefficient, and people come to resent them. All decisions in meetings should follow How We Decide.
If we are going to have a meeting, then everyone in the meeting should be On Time and Present for the meeting. This is common decency, yes, but it has a greater importance. There is someone else on the other side of your agreement to start the meeting at a certain time. They have stopped what they are working on to attend the meeting on time. If you do not show up on time, they cannot start the meeting, but they also cannot leave, because they don’t know if you’ll show up the next minute or not.
Each minute that they are away from their work is a minute of productivity that you have stolen from them. This is not only disrespectful but also counterproductive.
But life happens. A previous call or meeting may run late. Traffic doesn’t always cooperate. Even with careful planning, it’s not possible to be on time for every meeting. The good news is that you don’t need to be.
It is only critical to let the other members of the meeting know that you will be late as soon as you realize that you will be. And you must come to this realization (and let the other attendees know) before the meeting starts, through whatever channel will get to them the fastest. Ideally, you’d let them know about the delay before they have to break away from whatever they are doing before the meeting.