How Often Do You Have Team Meetings?

You know what I've been thinking a lot about lately? Well, dirt bikes, but besides dirt bikes, meetings. I've been thinking about how many meetings is too many meetings. And if a meeting maker were to make a meeting that is the perfect meeting of meetings, how many meetings would you make during that meeting? These are the questions that keep me up at night. And you know, I imagine many of you clicked on this video because you thought I had the perfect answer to how many meetings you should have in your business. The fact is, I got no freaking idea. I'm just here because I am really curious about this shit, as many of you probably are as well. And I'm hoping together in this video and through the comments, we can piece together a normal and talk about what meeting cadence should look like, does look like, what's working, what's not working together. Because after researching this topic for months, and if not years at this point, I've come to believe that meetings are a really, really important tool for building a certain culture in your team. What you include in the agenda, what you don't include the cadence. Who's there, who's not there. This has such a huge ripple impact. Ripple impact. That was weird. Ripple effect that it's not something we can just view as a function of operations. Meetings are really more of a function of business strategy. Seems like, at least to me. And it deserves a lot of our time and attention if we want to make sure we're doing culture and doing team building in a way that aligns with our goals and our brand. So. So for any of you who are, I don't know, brave enough to stick through that rambling intro, I'm going to go through the meeting cadence we had here at ProcessDriven last year. Talk about some things that didn't work about that cadence. What we switched to for this year and kind of, I don't know, hopefully set the stage for where we might head in the future around what's not working and working around team meetings. One on one meetings, check in, meetings, meetings, meetings, meetings, you name it. So 2022, here is what ProcessDriven's meeting structure was. Real, real joyride of a schedule. We had an all team meeting, meaning the whole team got together every week for a meeting. Our team at that times, I don't know, probably fluctuated between six and eight people. So pretty small team. We still are small. Six to eight people at that time because they were about one hour every week. It was four hours per employee in these all team meetings. That was our first meeting and our meeting, by far after all teams, we also had one on ones which were basically manager direct report, one on one conversation. I guess I should say at this point we are in a fully remote team. So these one on ones kind of replace the casual water cooler conversations you'd have in a physical workplace. So these have been something we implemented, I think just last year. And These meetings were 45 minutes per week, weekly meetings. So four hours a month of time, that's one on ones. The third call we had on the docket were roll Calls and roles, an acronym that stands for a bunch of different things, but basically it's auditing. What people have been working on, what is their assigned role in the company, where can they grow all sorts of things around elimination, delegation and growth. These roll calls are kind of like performance reviews. And we did them crazily often. We did them monthly. And it was between the employee and not just the manager, but also myself. So it was myself, the manager and the employee in this room virtually. And it was three hours of human labor a month just on these roll calls. Talk a bit more about why we changed that later, but you might be able to make some guesses here. The fourth meeting we had last year around this time was Quarterly Review. Now this is an event that has changed a lot over the years, but Quarterly Review is basically the internal version of the Layla's Look Back. We publish here on the YouTube channel. For guys who don't know what that is, check up here. It's basically where I air all the dirty laundry of our company, talk about how imperfect we are and talk about kind of internal happenings. The Quarterly Review is our internal equivalent of that, where I kind of open our books, show where we're at profit wise, show where we're at savings wise, Big quarterly review of where the business is at for the internal team. These quarterly reviews, as you might have gathered, were quarterly. It was one third of an hour per employee because it was really three every quarter. And then about three hours for me over the quarter to create those presentations again, just kind of like a strategy. Here's where we're at kind of thing every quarter. Fifth meeting we had regularly was lunch. And learn virtually. Folks come on to Google Meet, we have lunch, someone presents something, whether it's a guest speaker or a team member. We talk, we chat. Meeting over. That would be about one hour per employee. It was an optional event and we had those monthly. The sixth event here on the docket was internal consulting. This was something that kind of was born of me. No longer working with with one on one private clients. And like many of you, perhaps I get bored easily. I like to have the stimulation of a challenge. And at this point in time I felt like I was getting kind of disconnected from some of the team members. And I thought it'd be kind of cool to take the process consulting I was doing for clients and work with our own team to do kind of internal process consulting work. This worked really well for the first few months and then eventually it kind of devolved, which I'll talk about soon. And this took about 1.5 hours for every employee who was involved. It was kind of a show up and we'll figure it out thing. And we did a process consulting consulting session for a given process where multiple stakeholders needed to be involved. These were monthly. So the good and the bad. The good. Let's start with the good because it's a very short list so it's easy to remember. The good thing about this current layout is the one on ones. This was the first year we had worked in those one on ones into kind of our docket. We'd kind of done them in the past, but not really. This became a mainstream thing last year where it was 45 minutes for each person weekly with their manager. And this is really, really good. I, as someone who is an introvert and generally hates meetings, I was very resistant to implementing one on ones because I thought they were going to be just another meeting. And that is completely not the case. I was so off base with what I thought one on Ones are versus what they actually are. One on Ones have become such an instrumental tool in coaching our team, seeing them grow and giving real time feedback. If I had to pick one meeting to keep in the entire company and cancel everything else, it's it would be one on ones because it has been really amazing to see how using those one on ones effectively and dialing in those agendas to focus more on personal growth, career growth and feedback have really resulted in folks being able to flourish in ways that we just weren't seeing before we implemented these one on ones. The other nice thing about the one on Ones is that we can really tailor them to what a specific person needs. For some team members, that is mentorship. For other team members, it's kind of kind of coaching on work, life balance. And for other one on ones it's kind of focused on logistics stuff like I'm stuck on this question, can you help me so on. And doing those things in one on ones really helps you avoid wasting other people's time by having those being in group discussions where it's really only relevant to one person. But that's really all I have in terms of good about this setup. I thought this was going to be a great idea when we implemented it. And honestly, I absolutely hated this meeting cadence. Here are some of the bad things that were happening. The worst thing about this whole cadence was this guy. The all team meetings they became by the end of the year, these like very long, very dry status report fests. People would prepare the agenda, they'd fill in notes, and then you'd just sit there for an hour as people read the notes that were already written. And it was like, why are we doing this? I don't have the attention span for this. I couldn't. I just dreaded going to the meetings. And I didn't really get any feedback from the team that they didn't like them, but I hated them. So I was like, maybe I'll play around with it a bit. And I'm very glad we did because the new layout has, I think, helped everybody all around, which I'll talk about in a moment. The second problem area was the roll calls. Having a performance type chat, a coaching opportunity every month when you're already meeting every week is just too much. Even when it replaced the meeting so we weren't doubling up. It was just a lot of conversation around the same things. Also, the two on one ratio of those role meetings made them feel really formal and kind of uncomfortable for everybody involved. And I don't feel like facilitated the kind of a goal I had for the roll call work. Plus it also prevented that person from giving feedback about their manager because their manager was literally in the room. One thing that I changed in the future because of this and feedback that came out after shifting this is that now we are doing role reviews without the direct manager involved. They give feedback everybody, but they're not actually in the room for those conversations, which is really going to open up a lot of honesty, I hope, because when we had this two to one ratio, I found out a lot of stuff was not being shared in the room because of that factor that really should have been. Two more bad things about this were the quarterly reviews. So this kind of one hour monologue of me talking about business strategy and answering questions, it was just too short, too infrequent. People weren't getting it. And it honestly could have just been a YouTube video. I mean, there wasn't a whole lot in that quarterly review that was interactive, that was helping people learn and Grow. They were just consuming. And if people can just consume a meeting, I don't think there should be a meeting. Really no meeting happening. There's just listening. And so that quarterly review I think wasn't so successful. We had tried to shorten it for various reasons. And I'm very glad that now moving forward, we've actually gone the opposite direction. And I'll tell you more about what we did in a moment. The very last thing though, the very last problem I had about all this and what really kind of was the straw that broke the camel's back and forced me to change this entirely, was the part timers and quarter timers. So we have part time employees and quarter time meaning like 10 hours or less. And for those folks, they were spending ridiculous percentage of their week in meetings. And when I actually took over some of these folks as direct reports, I started looking at their time logs and I realized they spent 15% of their week in meetings about work that they weren't actually doing. And it just felt bonkers. And when I talked to some of them, they agreed and we started shifting things around. So that brings me to 2023. Here is our current meeting structure here at ProcessDriven. I've highlighted in yellow the changes. Here's what we've got going on. The team meeting has changed to being monthly instead of weekly and it is focused on just one hour per employee. So it's kind of shortened a little bit in time. And this all team meeting has changed drastically in agenda. Rather than having the all team meeting be a status report, there is now a rule that there can be no status reports in ALTI meetings unless it's like an important like drop everything headline. And we need to have a discussion to confirm people are aware of this major change. No, if it is just a headline, sure we can type it in the agenda, but really it should go into our announcements channel in our kind of communication area. So we have kind of a slack in ClickUp setup. We talk about it up in this video and in there we have a little area where folks can share status reports about the company. That's where things like that go. But this all team meeting is now purely focused on analyzing key metrics, celebrating things that have gone right such as core values and testimonials and all that kind of good stuff. And mainly like 90% discussion more than the frequency change, which is significant. This all team meeting has completely transformed by changing this agenda and has gone from being this boring snooze fest where people are multitasking which don't like that stuff. We no longer have it Be a multitask, friendly meeting. It is a conversation and everyone who is there is either conversing or not at the meeting. That's the first shift. The second shift is the one on ones. We have reduced the frequency slightly and for part time and quarter timers, we've made them less often rather than weekly. They're either every other week or weekly and shorter. The next shift was roll calls. They went from monthly to quarterly and they went from being with the manager, myself and the direct report to just myself and the direct report. This gets the manager out of the room so we can have more candid conversations, hopefully catch more issues that should have been caught previously. We also reduce the time so it's 45 minutes for these sessions, although sometimes they go over and that's awesome too. What I like about having these less often is that the conversation is actually getting to a higher level. Like what's your career path here? Where do you want to go next? What skills do you want to learn? What professional development are you targeting? You know, bigger picture trends that you can do on a quarterly basis that are just too frequent and too small or big to do on a monthly basis. Beyond roll calls, we've also changed our quarterly planning. Rather than having a one hour, blah, blah, blah, Layla talking at you session for one hour, that's optional. We now have a required quarterly planning day. This quarterly planning day is actually something we had done in the past and we brought it back this year. Basically our quarterly planning day is a four to six hour window where we tell people, chill out, snooze on the inbox, focus in on just the big picture of working here. We talk about where the company is going, where the company's been, financial position because we have open books and most importantly, we do a workshop. So we'll focus on doing some kind of collaborative something during this quarterly planning day each quarter. Last quarter it was about market positioning for each of our offers. This quarter I'm kind of thinking it's probably going to be about AI and that's our new approach. The shift of this is going to make it more conversational, less luxury, and hopefully give more opportunity for connection between team members who don't get to work together every day. Next up, we have lunch and lunch. This replaces lunch and learn where we had a structured topic. In the past we had lunch and learn and it was great in theory. Someone would come, they'd present a topic, but attendance really dropped on the team when you Have a team of eight to 12 people, I mean people not showing up, that's pretty significant. It makes the room really small. And so it stopped making sense to have it if people weren't attending at the same time. The team was feeling disconnected. And so we came up with this idea of a lunch and lunch where basically the team wanted to just get together, have lunch and chat. And so that's what we're doing. Beyond lunch and lunch, we also have department only meetings. This is the biggest shift of anything else here. Rather than having all teams weekly, we changed all teams to monthly and department only two weekly. These department only meetings basically split the company in half and half the team and half the team depending on where they're working. They are meeting on a weekly cadence to talk about the daily operations of what they're doing. You know, difficult tickets, big projects. Any kind of discussion that needs to happen in order to keep things moving forward is happening in these 45 to 1 hour long meetings every single week quarterly. Team members do not have to attend these, which is another kind of savings of time versus the old approach. And these have proven to be really helpful and a great way to build connection and kind of increase the momentum of the team overall. For more on how we run those meetings or what the agenda is, you can check out the video up above. If it's not posted now, it should be published soon where it talks about what we include in each of those meetings. Now, the final and last meeting we added this year are the peer one to one calls or donuts that we're calling them. Basically this is a employee led initiative where they are basically being matchmakers for each other to just chat with their fellow team members. We are fully remote, we're asynchronous, we aren't online at the same time. We don't talk to each other that much outside of meetings. And so this peer one to one thing is basically an opportunity for them to connect with team members and just chat, connect, see what they're working on and facilitate that time to just see what's going on. I like these meetings as a business owner because I feel like it makes more opportunities for communication that prevents miscommunication or double work. And team members really seem to enjoy these as a way to feel more connected to other people, particularly when we're working remote, alone from home and not really interfacing with one another Otherwise. So from 2022 to 2023, that's all of our meetings. I could go into the what and how and the why. About all them, but that would triple the time of this video and ain't nobody got time for that. But leave it to say the biggest changes we've made are having our agendas focus on conversation and killing the idea of a status report meeting. Like ugh, who wants to be involved in that said, making sure we only have the people in the room who need to be in the room, particularly quarter time employees. They're not on the team enough to really get to their work, let alone spend two hours in meetings a week. So removing quarter time employees and part timers from some meetings have gone a long way. The last adjustment we've made is actually adding more niche meetings focused on a specific goal such as the peer one to one calls. Yeah, it's just 15 minutes every other week, but those 15 minutes have a return. Ridiculous ROI versus adding on all those weekly all team meetings that no one even talked during and people were multitasking during. Ooh. And I should also say in addition to this we also have ad hoc meetings for special projects where we might have a scrum meeting once a week for 15 minutes or something like that. But overall this giant list is it for the meetings and the conversations and the face to face time we have in our virtual company. So how about you? That's my mess. What's yours? I would love to know what your meeting cadence is. If you wouldn't mind dropping in the comment, let me know what your meetings are, how long they are, and how often they are throughout your company. If your answer is wildly different than mine, you may just inspire the next version of this video. And as things change here, just be sure to subscribe and like below because I will make sure to post an update as we inevitably evolve these cadences into 2024 as we figure out why this plan doesn't work. This may have been like the dorkiest video I have ever done on the channel here. So for those of you who have made it to the end, you know I appreciate you, I see you and till next time everybody enjoy the process.