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)
This is what works for me:
What has low efficacy:
So in short: use meetings very strategically for very clear goals, like producing requirements that everyone understands, or pass knowledge on.
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!
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.