"I would like to have some additional meetings"

Finding the right balance between too many and not enough meetings

The question came from an individual contributor after a workshop titled “This meeting could have been an email". That workshop helps teams to reduce the number of meetings, and now this participant asked me for help to achieve the exact opposite.

What had happened?

You see, this individual contributor had exactly three meetings per week: a 1-1 meeting with their immediate manager, a weekly meeting with the project team, and an all-company get-together alternating serious topics with fun activities.

And we were thinking about turning the all-company meeting into a more asynchronous affair.

From a management perspective that made sense. Every team manager had up to ten 1-1s per week, plus the team meeting, plus the meeting with their own boss, plus different project meetings. Of course they were invested in getting as many meetings off their plates as possible.

For their team members though, the 1-1 and the team meeting were often the only social interaction during the entire week. No wonder remote workers feel lonely!

Cognitively this person understood that meetings can quickly become a waste of time, not really conducive to getting things done. Emotionally they just wanted to talk to another adult human being from time to time.

How can you balance the needs of a company to get things done with the needs of an employee who wants to belong?

We settled on something intermediate. They were already involved in some of the more active interest-based Slack channels, so one option was to get people out of those Slack channels to talk about those interests. Maybe once a months a group discussions. Maybe once a week in 1-1 interactions.

There’s no rule that individual contributors can’t organize their own 1-1s to discuss work and non-work with those they work with. The manager’s role in this case is to encourage these interactions, and to make sure that employees know that those social conversations are valid, too.

So here’s your reminder for this week: just because you think you have too many meetings, doesn’t mean that everyone is in that same situation.

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Me, speaking

Peter Benei, from Anywhere Consulting did an amazing job in asking me all the most interesting questions about being a Head of Remote, about leading remotely, and about the intersection between operations and people. You can get the recording here.

And if you are in London, you can find me at the Future of Customer Contact Conference at The Brewery on Thursday, February 9th. I’ll be helping the Klaus team with the conference stand and talk about peer learnings during the early afternoon. The conference is free, so if you are in the area, sign up here and say hi.