TL;DR
Meetings are often inefficient and expensive. This guide helps you audit, redesign, and align your meeting culture with business goals.
- Identify which meetings work and which don’t.
- Tie meeting improvements to measurable outcomes like engagement or hours saved.
- Use a collaborative, team-inclusive approach to remove, redesign, or add meetings that align with your values and work environment.
Why Rethinking "How You Meet" Matters
Meetings can be a double-edged sword for organisations. Done right, they foster productivity, connection, and alignment. Done poorly, they waste time, erode morale, and cost significant resources. Post-2020, with hybrid work becoming the norm, meeting culture is more critical than ever—and also harder to get right.
When your meeting culture doesn’t align with your company’s values and operations, it impacts:
- Time and money: Inefficient meetings waste hours that could be spent on high-value tasks.
- Engagement and cohesion: Poorly designed meetings lead to disengagement and disconnection.
- Trust and psychological safety: Overloaded or ineffective meetings can erode team morale and trust.
Key Considerations for Meeting Design
Ask yourself:
- Are meetings aligned with your work environment and values?
- Think about team distribution, trust levels, leadership styles, and organizational structure.
- When did you last review meeting efficacy?
- What’s working? What isn’t? What documentation or practices are missing?
Common Meeting Problems
If any of these resonate, it’s time to take action:
- Overloaded calendars: “Not another meeting!” fatigue.
- Ineffective formats: Struggles with time zones or unclear agendas.
- Low engagement: Whether in town halls or off-sites, participation is lacking.
- Lack of cohesion: Meetings fail to foster connection or purpose.
- Functional misalignment: A one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work for different teams.
A Step-by-Step Meeting Culture Design Exercise
This exercise helps you identify, redesign, and operationalise an effective meeting culture. It’s best done collaboratively with input from all relevant stakeholders.
Step 1: Audit Your Current Meeting Landscape
Tools & Setup:
- Use a collaborative platform like Miro for an asynchronous or live workshop.
- Allocate 4–6 hours for the People team and 1 hour per functional team.
Actions:
- Map every type of meeting in your organisation:
- Categorize by scope: Company-wide (e.g., town halls) vs. team-specific (e.g., stand-ups).
- Duplicate meeting formats across relevant teams to highlight overlaps.
- Heat-map effectiveness:
- For each meeting, mark them as “Working” or “Not Working.”
- Discuss why certain meetings aren’t working, gathering input on issues like purpose, engagement, or format.
- Reflect:
- Can you answer these questions for each meeting?
- Why does this meeting exist?
- What format is used (synchronous/asynchronous)?
- When and how does it happen?
- Who participates, and why?
- Where does it take place?
- If not, dive deeper to identify gaps.
- Can you answer these questions for each meeting?
Step 2: Remove or Redesign Meetings
With audit insights, the next steps involve streamlining your approach.
- Identify problems:
- Examples: Too many meetings, engagement issues, or poor timezone management.
- Decide what to keep, cut, or change:
- Align decisions with company values, goals, and operational realities.
- Redesign for scalability and culture:
- Account for global distribution: Reduce reliance on synchronous meetings in multi-time-zone teams.
- Adapt for team needs: For example, tech teams may prioritise deep work over frequent check-ins.
Practical Example: Core Meeting Types to Evaluate
- Company-Wide Meetings (e.g., Town Halls):
- Purpose: Inform and align large groups.
- Evaluate formats for engagement and accessibility (e.g., recording options for global teams).
- Team-Level Meetings (e.g., Stand-ups, 1:1s):
- Purpose: Drive team-specific progress.
- Align cadence and structure with team goals and workload.
- Informal Socials (e.g., Off-sites):
- Purpose: Build connection and belonging.
- Customise to meet evolving team needs and ensure inclusivity.
Target Outcomes Of Your Meeting Design
By completing this exercise, you’ll:
- Gain a clear view of which meetings are effective, which aren’t, and why.
- Streamline your meeting schedule, freeing up valuable time.
- Enhance engagement and collaboration across teams and time zones.
- Tie meeting improvements to measurable business outcomes (e.g., hours saved or increased engagement).
Pro Tips for Long-Term Meeting Success
- Focus on near-term goals, but commit to regular reviews (e.g., annually).
- Use feedback loops to refine your approach as your organisation scales.
- Align meeting culture with core values to ensure it supports—not hinders—your mission.
Resources for Further Exploration
📕 Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule
📕 Effective Meetings at PostHog
📕 Meeting Best Practices at Pento
