You need more meetings
You need more meetings
Work can be done asynchronously. Relationships are created in person.
At the beginning of the year Shopify announced they’d be cancelling all their employee's’ meetings.
All recurring meetings with three or more participants, that is.
They are actively and consciously targeting status update meetings. Those can be moved to email / Notion / Confluence / Loom videos.
They did not cancel regular meetings between individual contributors and their manager.
They do not ban entire teams to get together for brainstormings or design sessions.
Asynchronous work is hard. Asynchronous relationships are even harder.
Now, this one-time calendar purge won’t mean that those recurring status updates won’t creep back. They will.
As a manager it can be very frustrating if you send out a monthly update to your team, only to see that no one is reading it.
That’s one of root causes for excessive meetings. Just because you’ve decided that you are going to communicate doesn’t mean that the intended recipients are necessarily going to engage.
Unless they have skin in the game. Unless they get something out of that status update.
Hence, your status updates better include stellar copy writing or great presentation skills (or both) - or you manage to connect them to what your team worries about.
Making time for more personal relationships
How do you know what your team really cares about? How can you support not just your average team member, but every individual team member? That’s where 1on1s come in.
Theoretically you can do asynchronous 1o1s - and yet, humans connect much faster “in person”. Sharing time, even in a virtual space, accelerates getting to know each other. And if you can combine it with a IRL meeting once or twice a year - even better.
That’s why it’s so important to keep those status update meetings out of your calendar, so you can make time to really engage with individual team members.
And that’s not my theory, that’s the result of a Gallup study on managers (summary and additional studies here):
“Managers — more than any other factor — influence team engagement and performance… 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.”
Know yourself first, then get to know your team, one by one. That’s where the magic happens.
PS: If you don’t know how to do this - have a look at the Remote Leadership Accelerator. It’s the current best option to work personally with me on your leadership skills.