DEV Community

Rakan
Rakan

Posted on

Escaping the Meeting Trap: A Win-Win for Teams and Stakeholders

Today while driving, I was listening to a podcast between David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried (Basecamp founders). They were talking about how toxic meetings are for various reasons:

  • 1 hour meeting with 5 people is not a 1 hour meeting, its a 5 hour meeting. Because you are taking 1 hour of each person's time. So, you need to be very careful when you call a meeting.
  • They involve coordination, causing scheduling issues and disrupting everyone's workflow and mindset
  • They are usually not productive, because people are rarely prepared for them.
  • They drift off topic and go on tangents that are not relevant to the meeting.

After I finished listing to the podcast, I wanted to check if there are facts that support this. I found this reserch on Harvard Business Review According to their survey of 182 senior managers across industries:

  • 65% said meetings hindered their personal work completion.
  • 71% found meetings unproductive and inefficient.
  • 64% felt meetings compromised deep thinking.
  • 62% believed meetings missed opportunities to bring the team closer.

So, here is what some companies (Example: Basecamp and 37signals) do to avoid traditional meetings:

  • They go to first-writing approach instead of a first-meeeting approach. If there's something to discuss, write it down first, share it with the team, and then have a meeting only if and only if it's absolutely necessary.
  • They use automatic weekly check-ins, like "What did you do this week?" through platforms like Slack. This keeps everyone informed and enables the creation of weekly reports for the team and stakeholders.
  • There are also occasional automated "social questions" to encourage team members to share non-work-related activities, fostering better relationships.

As a result, the stakeholders are happy because they are getting weekly reports and the team is happy because they are not wasting their time in meetings. 😄

Resources:

Top comments (3)

Collapse
 
latobibor profile image
András Tóth

This is what works for me:

  • super clear written communication: what have I worked on, why, whether I need help or not.
  • but written communication has boundaries: if it's too long, people skip reading them
  • therefore there are harder topics that require meetings
  • on those meetings it's best to write notes on the shared screen; when people can see their ideas find their place in a document they can stay more focused
  • later that document can be used as a reference to create tickets from it

What has low efficacy:

  • post-its; they are super hard to read, people usually photo them, and then they need to double work, guessing who wrote what, what that little 5 word sentence mean

So in short: use meetings very strategically for very clear goals, like producing requirements that everyone understands, or pass knowledge on.

Collapse
 
irakan profile image
Rakan

This was very insightful. I will surely note this. Indeed that people often skip some sections in a long post.. there should be some rules to write a post/document to make it easy, simple and to the point for the team. Thanks for sharing!

Collapse
 
latobibor profile image
András Tóth

Another thing to do is to make sure everyone is asked. Usually the most "passionate" members of the team will monopolize the conversation. Someone in the room must have the power to go through each person and hear out their opinions. This also serves as a check who should not have been in the meeting: "I don't have an opinion" or "I don't know". Maybe they were just added as an idea, but their time was taken.