Improving a Team Meeting Structure | Agenda, Timing, & Tech
One person walks through how they structure team meetings, covering agendas, timing, and tools like ClickUp and Google Calendar. They weigh synchronous versus asynchronous meetings and share research on what actually works to cut wasted time.
And we're going to talk about meetings because this is something that I am trying to puzzle out for myself. And it's also one of those back office kind of ongoing workflows in our business that we don't often have conversations about. First of all, let me just define what a meeting workflow is. To me, your workflow, let's start there. Your workflow is the way you do things. And meetings are a thing that many businesses need to do in some way, shape or form. And the purpose of talking today is to take the meeting habits you might have, be intentional about them, think about them, and define them in a workflow, which usually to me just means a visual representation of how you do things. It could be a flowchart, it could be something else. Today it's going to be something else. And once you have it out on paper, we can actually look at it, examine it, and understand how exactly does that meeting workflow serve or not serve the goals we have for that meeting? This approach obviously works for any part of business. Whether you're talking about service design or billing, or, you know, even how you do vacation time, everything has a workflow. And so today I want to do something kind of basic and back office to demonstrate how this workflow thinking can apply all over the business. Today I'm going to go through the normal process. I would. Well, I am going through to figure this out for my own business. So I would really welcome any insights, opinions or thoughts that you guys have, because this is not something I have figured out. I am bringing this here because I am actively trying to work on this. So I'm going to be going through the process of first just kind of talking about what this is, talking about my status quo, going through what I would go through, which is maybe doing a little bit of research and then making a change and testing it and seeing how it works. So here we are, we've got our meetings, and I'm just going to scroll down here and talk about why this is becoming a priority for me. So one of the kind of, you know, certain things that you just hear and you're like, that's bad. You just know that's not the way things should be going. Using meetings for information transfer is one of those things that's just. It's bad, it's outdated. It's not the best use of human meeting time. And I had a client this week who actually started talking about their meetings and he was kind of explaining something along the lines of, you know, they get together, they have the Very old school meeting of where they sit around and they just kind of give status updates of what's on their calendars. Meanwhile, they all have shared calendars. So they can actually look at this much quicker by just peeking into each other's calendars versus spending, you know, some time just discussing everybody's schedule verbally in a 15 to hour long meeting. I have other clients right now who are in a very meeting intensive culture. And so the topic of meetings has come up a lot. And today what I want to talk about, Today what I want to talk about is my own meeting culture and how I can make it kind of better serve the intent that I have for meetings. In my opinion, meetings are not supposed to be about information transfer. It's about pulling human beings together to do something that human brains are needed to do. This information transfer is something that can be done through technology and I think it can probably be done more effectively and more efficiently through technology. I would much rather just look at someone's calendar than spend 15 minutes every morning having them read it to me. So, yeah, the information transfer came to my attention. I was like, all right, this is something that I need to work on because I've noticed that in our team meetings here. And I'll tell you what my structure is and why I'm not so happy with it. I've noticed that we've skewed into that information transfer. You can tell this when you hear people listing off things. They're scrolling through notifications or they're opening their email in order to speak in the meeting. That's kind of your red flags that you are starting to have an information centric meeting and therefore probably not using your people's time to the best or the fullest way. I'd rather use that brain power than just have people read off their schedule that's supposed to be brain. Doesn't really look like it. All right, we're going to keep going. So what are the kind of different mechanisms involved in a meeting? Let's start with this. The three basic pieces which, I mean, see if I have the book behind me here. I do not. It's somewhere around here. I have a few books recently that they're older books, but I'm reading them and they have a lot of good stuff around system building. That's part of what's so fun of being a young entrepreneur working in a space like business systems. Because business systems are ancient. They've been around as long as businesses have. And so the stuff that we're learning isn't exactly new, it's just repurposing old stuff. So reading these old books, their information or their approach to meetings is very different. For them, information sharing was actually necessary because there wasn't as much of a digital infrastructure. Today, that's changed. But some of the things about meetings have stayed the same. And some of those essential pieces are what I am going to draw out here. Timing or consistency, that's kind of the first piece of the meeting, a better word. But this is kind of like your rules and expectations for the meeting. Simple things like show up, That's a good rule. Maybe you might see some practices that say, identify issues, don't try to solve the issues. Each kind of approach to meeting has a different policy approach. But when you combine those three pieces, you really can build out by pulling the levers in different ways. You can build out any book talking about meeting rhythms using these three pieces, at least as far as I found so far. So if we change the timing to be more frequent or less frequent, the agenda to be this or that, we can start building out all these business frameworks from the gurus, whether they're a lot of old or recently. But technology, as I alluded to, already, has changed this a little bit. The need to share information has lessened. And so in these older books that we're reading, we really need to take that for a grain, with a grain of salt around what they include in their agenda. Because a lot of older businesses, information sharing was a huge piece of the agenda, whether that's putting it on the whiteboard or verbally talking through it. So the main change, the main other variable that new businesses have to think about when it comes to meeting, is synchronous versus asynchronous. And this is kind of where I just want to lay this landscape because this is where I've started to have a little bit of thinking about where I'm kind of puzzled about how to best do this. Because a lot of the books, because they are not used to working in an asynchronous environment, they don't really know, they don't really give you a lot of guidance around this. Right. We can look to the gurus or the accomplished entrepreneurs of old to find a lot of good wisdom. But when it comes to new technology and how to apply it in a way that's still human, we kind of need to pioneer a bit. So let me first explain what the difference is. So asynchronous is the idea that's over here on the left side. If I Can get my gray. Asynchronous is kind of what we're used to when it comes to most communication today. That is an ugly gray. That's the one I wanted. Asynchronous suggests that you are sending in messages and someone else will see them when they see them. This is including things like Voxer, social media, email, all of that stuff is asynchronous because you shoot out that message when. Whenever you think of it and when the person gets it. Great. On the other hand, synchronous is the more traditional approach to meetings or really any communication. You have people in the same room at the same time and they talk about something. You call someone up, they have to answer in that moment, and you talk about something. Obviously there's a little bit in between, like maybe you could ping someone to say, let's jump on a call. But more or less, those are the two categories today. And previously we were all living in kind of a synchronous communication environment in business and personal life. We've increasingly moved over to asynchronous texting. We're really flying up there. Texting replaced phone calls for many people. Voicemail becomes the new phone call. Voxer replaces phone calls. Video recordings like Loom replace video calls like FaceTime. We've kind of shifted more and more into an asynchronous world and there are people who have pushed back to that. But nonetheless, we've introduced another variable into R. Now four part, four pieces of levers that we can use to design our meeting workflow. So timing, slash, pace, agenda, the policies and rules we have. And then not really sure what's a good word for this category. I would just say, like, is everyone in sync or not in sync? Is it all at the same time or is it not in the same time? Do we all have to be there at the same moment or not? Hint. If you have people in different time zones, most likely you're going to be leaning towards the asynchronous way. So let's just pop up here and talk about what I'm currently doing and why I'm maybe not the happiest with it in terms of these three main categories. And I will add the actual sync in here. Let's go ahead and make this sync. Okay, so of these ones that are here right now, my team is using two different types of recurring meetings. And it's actually kind of bad that there's only two. That's one of the things I'm dissatisfied with. So we have a Tuesday meeting which has a set agenda of kind of like what's coming up. I know that sounds very information oriented. I actually. Let's see what I have here. I have schedule. Schedule of week, terms of client work. Oops. Schedule of week and goals and priorities. Like what you're working on. Basically priorities and then road bumps. That's what that schedule is. This is a. We say it's a 30 minute meeting, sometimes it gets longer. We don't even have that many people. So that's kind of shocking. Tuesday for 30 minutes. Our policies are none. We have no policies around what needs to happen during that meeting. And synchronous or asynchronous, that is sync. We are all doing that on the same time on Zoom. The other meeting that I currently have in my workflow is a Thursday meeting. So this is Thursdays. This is like five minutes, I'd say, let's say 15, because I need to read things. This is an asynchronous meeting and I actually use a ClickUp chat for that. So I'm going to put chat, which is in a ClickUp dashboard that's for our team meetings. It's called our status Quo update. So we actually have a pretty good template for that, which of course I don't have up on my screen, but I'll pop it up here to show you. I think I probably showed you before. I think it's something like how are you feeling? That's fine, I'll just lift it off. So generally I'm feeling is the first prompt since last update. So last update you give kind of a thing on what you have accomplished since the last update. By the next update I will. And this is a text template that we copy and paste into a chat widget to give our updates with timestamps. So this is a dashboard that we've built out in ClickUp and roadblocks, again is the question what's getting in your way? So the four parts to that, any policies or rules around that that we actually have a pretty good rule around in the sense that we have a full template. So they just copy and paste and fill in the blanks. Mad Lib style for how are you feeling? All that stuff. It's all right there in terms of the rules for that one. I feel like we've got a little bit of a stronger system now. What. I'll leave that there. What am I not happy about in this workflow? Because this is what I have currently and I feel like there's some stuff missing. Some of the things I think are missing for me is that I think there are not enough policies around the Tuesday meeting. And I also think it ends up being very information transfer by accident. I think this is just an evolution of we've gotten comfortable, we've gotten into a rhythm and we've started to get lax and actually following our own agenda. We're not. We're honestly rarely following this agenda. We're doing a lot of catch up time which is not bad in any way but maybe isn't the best use of the meeting time. So the fact that there's information transfer is something that I want to solve for that's like my X I'm trying to solve for in this equation. And I think the policy gap might be a way to do this. I'm also not super thrilled with how long these meetings take because of the fact that they're like either too short or too long. We've got a really small team to take 30 minutes just to do this piece to me feels either. You know, it's too long for just a quick check in but it's too short to actually discuss anything. So I want to think about what pacing makes the most sense. Especially as I'm right now. That's a good shameless plug here. I'm hiring another VA here so if you are 1099 US based VA who is good at some data entry and some marketing stuff, let me know. But as we're bringing on someone else I want to have this really locked down for that person to kind of smoothly fall in to one or both of these meetings. All right, so that zoom zoom is fine. I think one thing that I also not super happy with which is something I've recommended to clients and I really want to make sure I'm also applying what I'm recommending is we don't have any real record of what we talk about in this meeting. So that's probably ties into either the policies or the agenda. But I love how the Thursday asynchronous check in we can scroll through and see each other's updates for the past months through the chat widget that are all timestamped. But with these synchronous meetings not only do we get off topic, but we don't always know what we talked about the last week. So that's something I really want to work on as well. So that is. I think that's about where I'm at with status quo on my own internal meetings. I also would be really interested in looking at kind of a different kind of Huddle. Sorry, left handed. It really makes this whiteboard scenario kind of finicky adding in additional recurring meetings. So maybe it's monthly for content planning, maybe it's quarterly for strategic goals. A lot of those things right now I have for myself on a repeating schedul. But I don't know about you guys. When I have a meeting just with myself, I am far more likely to put it off, delay it, squeeze it into a weekend by accident because I want to focus on something during the week or get in that extra client call. So I'm wondering if maybe I could bring out some of those other planning style meetings and incorporate other people into them and have, you know, this agenda and stuff for maybe monthly or quarterly stuff. So that is. That. That is status quo. If you are just joining us, we are talking about. Before I flip forward, we are talking about meeting workflows or meeting processes and trying to improve it. Personally, I'm just working on mine. I do not have any solutions today. I would just love to hear your insights. I'm just going to give you a live look at how I try to improve these things when I don't have necessarily the idea of what's going to be the right solution. So when I start identifying the things I don't like about a process, my next move is to move into like an intuitive state just to imagine, you know, what do I think? Knowing nothing. What do I think I could do to make this better? And I already talked about some of that adding I need to firm up my agenda. Firm agenda for those weeklies. For the synchronous weeklies. I might want to consider giving some other time. We're extending it even to have time dedicated for just the catch up time. I know that's important. I just don't know where that needs to go because you know, we are humans who need to catch up and just see how things are going. What else is my like intuitive sense about this? I think that there is an important place for having Zoom discussions. As much as it's way more efficient to have asynchronous meetings, my intuition is telling me I probably should keep doing Zoom ones. Yeah. So I'm going to keep doing that. The other thing that's coming up for me, which I already just mentioned, is that I could probably pull in more team members to the planning stuff that I'm doing with myself. I'll just do that other meetings. And one other thing while I'm sitting here, one other thing. I'm sure there'll be a few other things. Another thing that I'm thinking about is that perhaps it could be good to have some one on one time. I think sometimes our meetings get filled up with a lot of stuff because maybe we need to talk about something that's personal to one person. It might be good to have a space for those things to be taken offline and use just the people who are relevant to it time. So one on one meetings or one on one ways to communicate. Maybe some more of that would be good. What else do I think if any of you guys are watching here and you have pieces of your meeting workflow that you find really, really works, I would love to hear it. I'm going to just put one last thing and I'll move on here. Issue identification is something that I try to do a pretty, not to say militant but very on it job when it comes to client sessions. Because we have tight timelines, we want to make sure we accomplish things. So when topics come up we're really focused on identifying them, listing them somewhere, and then moving on through the meeting. Not necessarily solving them sometimes with these synchronous huddles. Because it's our time to catch up, we sometimes get into solving while we're identifying. So I think that is a issue identification. Getting better at facilitating that is something that I can definitely do or should be doing. So intuition is great as we know just thinking about things and saying, oh, I wonder if that can be a nice way to kind of kick off things. Because you're starting from a place of soul. You're starting from a place of your own thinking. You're starting without bias of what gurus or other thought leaders are saying. But you only know so much and you're only aware of the things that you're aware of. So you don't know what you don't know. The next stage of whenever I'm trying to plan a workflow for something I don't know anything really about is to go to the research phase. I did a little bit of prep for this live. If this is helpful to you, let me know. I'm trying to walk you through exactly what my process looks like to help you maybe walk through this as well. If this is different than what you would do, please tell me. Like I said, I'm still trying to solve this so your insights would be appreciated. When I'm trying to research something, I start at my good old friend Google. When it's templates or SOPS related, I'm usually looking for PDF in the actual search results. So that way I'm seeing something that I can actually see. The physical thing I'm not interested in. Sorry, I'm not usually interested in mindset pieces or theories. I'd like to see the tangible outputs and judge that rather than the hype that goes around it. I'm usually doing a search with PDF in it and then I'm just scrolling, I'm going through all the results to see, you know, what do we have here? And as I find things that are interesting, I just kind of consume it all. I don't do a lot of record keeping at this phase. You certainly could if this is a big initiative. But for something like a meeting agenda, I'm just consuming, consuming, consuming and saving things as I go that I think are interesting. Here you'll see it just pulled some. Hopefully this isn't copyright infringement because I'm just screenshotting what I found on Google Google Images. So this is a source from whoever Infinity is and it goes through a daily Scrum meeting. So sometimes if I'm working on something that I know there's thought leadership on, I might look for daily meeting scrolling Scrum because I know Scrum has a daily meeting that they prescribe and I might look at their. What I see is their policies. Okay, these look pretty interesting. I think I have most of these already down, so I'm already kind of following what they're saying. Except for this last one where it's the three questions. Oops, move my whiteboard around. So this is interesting to me to look at what their three questions are. What did I do yesterday? What will I do today? And what's in my way? I think this is great, but for me, this seems kind of information y like these two pieces. I could just look, I'm using ClickUp in my workspace. Many of you probably are too. These questions are information based that I could just see looking at someone's lineup or what work they did in the past. What's in my way is very similar to the road block question I already have in my asynchronous Scrum. So not. I'm not learning a whole lot from this one. But again, I think this might be one of those moments where not to say that this predates technology, but maybe they're just not working in it system like ClickUp, so that these questions are necessary in the way that they are not for me. So let's just keep looking. What else we have EOs. All right. I don't know if any of you are EOS companies, but I'VE been. It seems like EOS is like the thing now for my clients. We're with a lot of US companies right now and this is the EOS level 10 meeting. I know about this just because I've heard about it. This is their prescription. And eos. I don't know who does your graphic design. Man, your worksheets are ugly. I hope that person's not in here. If it is, I'm sorry. So this is the agenda that they use for their Level 10 meetings, which is their. You know, I believe these are their weekly meetings. Weekly huddles with each team. Yep. And this is the structure that they use. Now. I'll notice here that I believe these are hour and a half meetings. Yep. There's my math. Hour and a half meetings. They have kind of the opening kind of banter time scorecard based on KPI's their rock review, which I know already is their quarterly themes or whatever you want to call them there the big things that they're working towards. Headlines from kind of wins on the customer or employee side to do list identifications of issues and then conclusion. What I like about this is that they're adding in some elements that I haven't maybe thought of, like customer and employee headlines. I'm curious what that might sound like and I could dig in a little bit deeper into the research to hear. I know there's tons of blog posts by U.S. coaches who would tell me what that includes. Rock Review is. Interesting to tie everything back to the quarterly theme. I actually used to do this in my meetings and it's something that maybe I could bring back because we do have kind of sprints that we're working on at one time, but again, we can just look at that and click up. So maybe this isn't. I'm going to cross that out. I probably don't need that scorecard. KPIs. That could be interesting. Right now I have most of the measurements that are being done in my business I am measuring. But if I was delegating more of the measurement and they brought those as a topic during each meeting, even though it is information, it might give some more accountability about collecting that data. Could be interesting. And the banter that's great to do lists and identification of issues to do lists I definitely don't care about because we can already do that at any moment from ClickUp. But identifying issues that could be interesting. So what I'm doing right now in this research phase is just pulling out things that I know work. If you are doing this for part of your business where you have in house experts. This research phase is going to be more like a conversation. You might just buy someone coffee and they will rattle off what they know works. In this case I am working in a vacuum so I am going to my friend Google as my SME on this topic. So conclusion recap to do list cascading messages. I forget what that means. I used to know what that means. I do not know. If you are an EOS person and you know what cascading messages is, leave that in the comments so I don't have to go look it up and rating the meeting. I think rating the meeting is a little bit. Yeah, that's not my style. So I'm probably going to get rid of that. I'm going to recap the to do list. I'll get rid of that. I might look into whatever this is. So yeah, I don't know. There's some pieces there that are interesting. Let's just keep going through here. Who else do we have here? Whoever Vast conferences. Thank you for this Red Ban Yan, whatever that is. Daily huddle agenda. Here's another idea. Shout outs for notable achievements. Cool. So we're seeing the same theme as what we just saw in eos of kind of acknowledging wins then this is what made me pull the screenshot actually I thought this was a really interesting piece exemplify company core values. I have never thought doing this and I haven't seen this in the other of the pieces of IP that I've pulled here. So this to me is something I definitely want to keep an eye on. Having some kind of call out back to core values the things that we measure, we. Oh man, I'm going to butcher the quote the things that we actually keep an eye on and measure grow. But I can't remember there's a much catchier phrase for it. If you know that, go ahead and leave it in the comments. But basically if we're talking about something, if we're focusing on something, if we're keeping our eye on it, that's what's going to improve. And so if core values is something I'm really trying to instill as the team grows, this could be a really creative way to do that and top priorities for the day. Again, same thing as before. I have ClickUp. Maybe something that would be more effective for me would be to just look at having a policy around lineup rather than any of these things where they're like what are you working on today? Maybe we can just say by the Team meeting, have your lineup set up or whatever it is people are using to manage their agenda lineup policy. Again, leveraging the tools I have rather than having to spend more time talking about what we are each doing. All right, last thing, I want to go into scaling up because I know that they always have great content. So whenever I'm trying to figure out something and how it could work, as I scale up my tiny little business to a slightly less tiny business, scaling up is always a resource that I like to use. So shout out to them, you guys rock. So here's what they suggest as their daily huddle. Now some of these were weekly, this one's daily. I'm just pulling the best of the best Here they have this six part suggestion. Include timing, put it in a good setting. Stand up I thought was a good point. Who attends? Make sure it's small. Frequency timing, we've talked about that already. Who runs meeting agenda? This is the part that I really was interested in. What's up? Basically, what's going on? What are the daily metrics? And where are you stuck now? For me, these questions got the closest to something that I actually need to know. These seemed like the least informational questions of any of these templates that I've already seen. And so to me this is pretty. Especially daily metrics. That to me is very interesting. And where are you stuck? Is very direct. So I think these are some of the questions I'm going to pull on the heaviest and combine all these ones that I've shouted out to you already into what is going to become our meeting agenda. And remember, I'm pulling all this information. I've got two places to go with it. It can either be on my first meeting of the day, if I want to keep two per week, my first meeting of the week, or my second meeting of the week. Either way, I'm going to be pulling the stuff and then spreading it out into those two meetings. Right now I'm taking as an assumption that I'm going to continue having two meetings per week. One synchronous, one asynchronous. Maybe that'll change. But as of right now, I only want to mess with one thing at a time. So I think agenda and policy kind of hand in hand. There are the two things I'm going to mess with. So onto the try phase. The try phase is where we actually start trying to change things about our workflows. This is where I find that people get really trigger happy and they start trying to get into it far too soon. Or they try to completely overhaul things, which I'm also guilty of. So if you're that way, don't worry about it. But when we're talking about workflows like client services or that kind of stuff, it can be really tempting to just completely just dump the entire box out on the floor and say, we don't want any of this stuff. Just throw all the pieces out and start over. Just like with fine tuning services, just like with pretty much anything that we do. Starting from scratch is rarely the best way to go because we may much better served by making one change and seeing what happens than trying to change everything and have no idea what actually what actually resulted in the change, if anything. So here's our box dumping stuff out. What I'm going to try to start implementing this is to take all that stuff I just researched and the first thing I'm going to try is to change. I'm going to leave constant. Let's go back to this actually. Whoop. Flipping across the screen. We're going on a ride. All right, here we are. At this point, I'm going to keep timing and pace constant. I'm going to keep the same schedule of meetings. I'm going to keep the same style of meetings down here, synchronous and asynchronous. I'm going to keep all that fixed and I'm going to adjust the agenda and the policies, which I know is two things for this week. So I'm going to try doing that for next week and see what happens. I'm going to pull from the research. I'm going to zoom way out here just to give us a second sense of all the stuff that I looked at. I'm going to pull all of those areas that I starred kind of pull it into, probably one click up note, filter down the ones I want and then throw in the new agenda for our weekly meetings. And I'm going to try it first on the synchronous meetings because those are the ones that I feel a little funnier about. I'm going to try first manipulating the agenda. And if that seems to help, I'm going to probably keep going in that direction, keep that, and maybe pivot some other things. If the agenda doesn't seem to be doing anything in the workflow and it doesn't solve these initial issues that identified here, then I might try pulling some other levers around timing. But the idea here, around modifying this workflow just like any workflow, is to make a little change and see what happens. There are so many variables when it comes to meetings because there's humans involved as well as technology as well as cultural pieces that it could. This is a bit of a thing to experiment on, but yeah. So technology wise, what I'm going to be doing is just taking this, collecting it, using a ClickUp notebook or something like that, and just jotting down my agenda. I will then put that agenda into the body of either a Google Calendar invitation, since we use Google Calendar here, or I will put it into a ClickUp doc and link that doc within the Calendar invitation. And I'm just going to try it. I'm not going to have a good way to measure this. I think it's probably going to be qualitative. I'm not going to do any real data collection. I'm just going to have a conversation about it and see if that works. But this is how just to wrap us up here messing with my meeting workflow. So if you guys have any thoughts about this, if you have a meeting workflow that you enjoy, I would love for you to share it in the comments below. Just like everything else, your questions or your answers, I'm going to say that questions to answer, just answers or questions are appreciated here because I don't know the solution to this, but I want to let you know how I'm approaching it. Just like you could approach any other part of your business. If you are tired of trying to piece together YouTube videos to figure out how to align your workflow, your processes and your ClickUp account, well, maybe it's time that we talk. I work one on one with a select group of clients every quarter to help people build out their systems and processes. Find out more at ProcessDriven. Go.
