The meeting advantage for distributed teams
How meetings can help your team being more productive
Meetings have a bad rap.
They waste everyone’s time. They clog up your calendar. They are boring. This meeting could have been an email.
Or maybe you are using the dough mixer to make a smoothie, and unsurprisingly the result is not what you were expecting.
You could now declare dough mixers as the root of all evil in your kitchen. Or you could learn to make cookies, cakes, pasta dough and empanadas.
Meetings are a tool to make meaning
Most meetings in your calendar orginiated with a grand idea: making a decision on something, updating others about progress, checking in with team members. You could argue that many of these things can be done asynchronously, on google docs or confluence documents, via Jira or Trello boards, on Hubspot or Zoho, maybe embedding a little loom video somewhere in between.
And yet, humans learn and absorb a lot faster when talking with each other (not at each other) about certain topics. As Elizabeth Ayer writes, meetings are collaborative spaces whose quality depends on the participation and presence of those who attend the meeting.
So, instead of moving all of your meetings to a document right away, what about this tiny little change:
Open up the meeting invite for this week's meetings and at the top and the end of the agenda (or instead of a nonexistent agenda) write down what you expect from this meeting, in a yes/no format.
You want to be able to assess the success of the meeting answering “yes” or “no” to the premise.
For discussion and decision meetings, it will look something like this:
By the end of this meeting we have decided on the priorities for Q4. Yes or no?
For information meetings, it will look something like this:
By the end of this meeting everyone is aware of the impact of launching feature X. Yes or no?
For social check-ins or connection meetings, it will look something like this:
By the end of the meeting we know each other better than before. Yes or no?
In a second step, make sure that you are inviting the people who actually have a stake and an opinion in that conversation.
Meetings can help create structure
I have been working remotely for most of my career, so my work habits are optimized to an inch of human possibility. I was able to create routines and rituals unhurried and learning from others who had been doing this for a long time.
That is not the case for most people in your company. They didn’t have the luxury of learning and experimenting. They were sent home with their laptop, asked to fend for themselves while also managing the mental (and physical) effects of a worldwide pandemic.
Many people rely on external cues and an outside structure to be at their most productive. That’s what they practiced all their lives:
Have lunch when Diogo gets up for lunch.
Power down the computer when Esther gets ready to leave.
Find out all the office gossip when Noah makes their way to the coffee machine.
In a distributed environment meetings can lend the structure that the office can provide through merely existing. That does not mean that you require daily early-morning stand-up calls (though for some this works, too).
Do have a look at your recurring meetings though. How do they create structure and encourage a cadence of work that works for your team?
Maybe your weekly update call should be on a Tuesday or Wednesday to inform the current week instead of disappearing in the Friday haze.
How can you use regular discussion calls to both engage and update your team about the last investor meeting?
And how can weekly 1-1s help your team members to feel more connected?
Meetings create social connections
If you heard me speak, you’ve probably got my stern reminder to always do your weekly or biweely 1-1s. Every person in a distributed company should have at least that one opportunity to connect every week.
Manager - team member meetings are more than just checking up on work. You hopefully can do THAT in your documentation hub. Those 1-1s are the equivalent of having a coffee with your team member, learning about their life and what may inspire or worry them at any given moment.
It doesn’t have to stop there, though.
You can create a buddy program for new hires or to help people create bonds across department lines.
You can use tools like Donut to match people based on interest and get to know each other.
Your goal is for everyone to happily make time for your next company meetup despite of the logistical hassle, because they are that excited about meeting their coworkers.
Don’t vilify meetings. Don’t make them the solution for everything. Instead, start using them as a tool to make meaning, create structure, and foster connections.
And don’t use your dough mixer for smoothies.