When your calendar looks like mine, it can easily mean 4-6 hours of endless loop of online meetings a day. Every day. It's a lot, I know. It's also the only way we can collaborate, solve problems, and move things forward together in our hybrid work culture.
In my case, these meetings are either sessions where I'm rather observing the discussion around the various topics so that I'm unlocked to connect the dots with other threads happening all around to do my job. Or I'm one of the active collaborators, oftentimes even the facilitator of the conversation.
Either way I'm responsible for the success of these sessions, so that my coworkers know it is time well spent. We're spread through 10 different countries on 2 continents, the overlap time is limited. There is very little or no room for useless or unproductive meetings with these constraints, let alone Zoom fatigue.
For me the minimal expected characteristics of a good meeting is something like this:
everyone is perfectly oriented around the goal of the meeting
preparation is required in advance
there is an agreed flow and structure of how we spend that time together
we don't leave the room without clear outcomes, decisions and action items
the start and finish times are sacred, we start on time and finish on time (or earlier)
there is a dedicated meeting page to support all of the above.
I make sure - especially for recurring meetings - that the group agrees on the structure of the meeting, the topics we'd bring in every time. So the structure of the agenda, or the themes on the agenda is set and fix. There are no surprises. Once we've done that, all we have to do is to fill it up time after time with the actual topics and issues and questions.
Now here's the twist I came up with a few months ago:
As soon as the group agrees on the themes of the structure, I create separate space for the following two types of information:
1. static, FYI type of information shared about the theme, but for async consumption prior (or after) the session
2. discussion topics on the page for active group discussion, decision making or action planning.
This works like magic for us and we're implementing a version of this more and more for our virtual meetings. Here's why:
First and foremost, people really like to be involved in discussing the expected flow of virtual meetings. It's one of the most basic engagement booster there is: ask them how they think it'd be best to run a recurring meeting. Expectations are set and clear, and everyone comes in knowing there is a high probability of success and a feeling of time well spent.
Also, this setup makes people engage with the subject of the meeting prior to the actual session. All of the themes on the agenda have dedicated owners with the responsibility of pulling together both the information to be consumed async and list all the discussion topics. But it's not just the theme owners who visit the meeting page in advance. It's also all participants of the meeting so that they can come in prepared.
Finally, this practice allows the facilitator to foresee the density of the topics, estimate if time allocated would be adequate to address everything, if some key people should be included for a specific topic or a decision to make.
This post was also shared on Medium.
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