A Note About Meetings (and how I organize my week)
A huge part of keeping everyone within your organization focused, aligned, and accountable is by scheduling relevant and productive meetings.
Ugh. I’ve seen the mugs - “This meeting could’ve been an email” - and in many instances, it’s true. Meetings are often a waste of time. That’s why during my Employee Onboarding process, I make sure to set the right expectations around meetings.
In this article, I’ll discuss meeting limits, meeting etiquette, meeting times, and meeting best practices. I’ll also share the recurring meetings I typically require and how I organize my week.
Meeting Limits
I try to limit meetings and attendees to an “as-needed basis”, as in only scheduling necessary meetings and asking attendees to join only if it’s required or particularly relevant to and for them. It’s not because I’m trying to exclude anyone from the conversation - their time is just better used doing something else.
That being said, I think there are some meetings that are incredibly relevant, even on a recurring basis. I’ll discuss these later in this article.
Finally, if you keep going back and forth over email or Slack, it may make sense to just have a meeting. If a quick meeting helps to align or catalyze or make things more efficient, by all means, do it.
Meeting Etiquette
Employees are required to attend meetings. Of course, life happens and stuff comes up, so it’s not the end of the world if someone can’t make a meeting. However, they need to let someone know (typically the meeting organizer) know beforehand. I typically encourage contractors to join *relevant* meetings, but they are not required to attend most meetings (unless it’s something we’ve scheduled directly with them).
As a general rule of thumb, I ask my meeting attendees to join meetings two minutes early. This gives them time to check their video, mic, and sound *before* the meeting begins (if they or someone else is participating remotely). Sometimes, it takes time to sign on and get set up, and it’s a huge waste of time waiting for everyone to get situated. Even for in-person meetings, arriving a couple of minutes early ensures the meeting actually starts on time.
Meeting Best Practices
Before and when scheduling meetings, try to answer the following questions:
What is the objective of this meeting? What is the desired outcome of the meeting?
Who absolutely needs to be in the meeting? Why is each person necessary?
Is this meeting absolutely necessary? If not, then maybe send a Slack message instead.
Proactively try to find a time that works with attendees’ schedules. I use the Google “Meet With” calendar function.
Give attendees a heads-up that you’ve scheduled a meeting to discuss <insert topic> and what you hope to accomplish at the meeting. You can take this a step further and explain why their attendance is needed.
Share an agenda or any pre-work that needs to be completed before the meeting. If pre-work needs to be complete or you need feedback on any of the agenda items, give participants enough time to collect the material you need.
Document any key information, decisions, and action items from the meeting.
Meeting Times
I typically work with fairly distributed teams (we’ve been remote-first since way before the pandemic!), so meeting attendance, etiquette, and productivity during meetings greatly impacts our overall productivity as a team. Even with a distributed team, I expect employees to be available during specific times for real-time requests, discussions, and meetings. As a team, we try to do our best to schedule recurring meetings at times that generally work for everyone, but there are times concessions will need to be made.
Recurring Meetings
The following meetings may not all be relevant to you and your company, but these are the recurring meetings I typically have at my companies:
Annual or Semi-annual Offsite: I think it’s important to get everyone in the same place at least once a year. We use this time to highligh achievements, review challenges and learnings, set objectives for the new year, realign expectations, and build culture. This might be difficult for some companies, but even hosting a remote offsite is better than nothing. In a future article, I’ll share how we typically organize our offsites.
Quarterly Board Meeting: Depending on the stage of the company, these may be required by your investors. In a future article, I’ll explain how I generally run my board meetings, but your investors may have different requirements/ you may prefer to do it another way.
Quarterly Town Hall: Each quarter, the Executive Team will give an update on our progress as a company. We talk about major wins, losses and learnings, how we’re tracking against our KPIs, our big picture strategy, and our runway. There’s also time for Q&A.
Quarterly Planning: Each quarter, key stakeholders will review our company objectives, identify tactics, and outline our strategy for the coming quarter. We do our best to stay aligned throughout the quarter, and this gives us a chance to reassess our objectives and prioritize new and existing tactics.
Weekly All Hands: This meeting is informative. During this meeting, we give key company updates, identify major roadblocks, and review our goals for the week. I’ll dive into our Weekly All Hands template in a future article.
Individual Team Meeings: These meetings are both informative and prescriptive. The goal for this meting is to review progress, ensure team alignment, remove bottlenecks, and identify actions. Depending on the company, I may have recurring product, marketing, engineering, sales, operations, and strategy meetings. I may have teams within those larger teams that also need to meet on a recurring basis. I may have a bi-weekly product/ engineering/ design meeting. When we ran into issues with our supply (e-commerce), we had daily inventory meetings. Remember, not everyone needs to be a part of every meeting. People need time to actually do the work.
1:1s: I try to have 1:1s with each of my direct reports at least once a week. This gives us time to review progress, remove bottlenecks, keep one another accountable, and grow individually.
[Ad hoc] Retrospectives, emergency meetings: There are meetings that will occur from time to time but don’t necessarily need to be pre-scheduled.
[Optional] Daily standups (consider doing these async): In some instances, it may make sense to do a daily standup. We used to do daily standups in our fulfillment warehouse (e-commerce), and our engineering teams used to do daily standups - it really depends on the needs of the team. When possible, it may make sense to do these asynchronously. For example, we had a Slack Channel for our daily engineering updates. The first thing every morning, they reported on what they accomplished, what they’re working on, and any bottlenecks.
How I organize my week
What I didn’t mention in this schedule is that I like the start my day with ME TIME. Unless it’s an emergency, I don’t let anyone schedule meetings for the first hour of my day. This is a personal preference and is much easier to enforce as a C-level executive; it might be harder to enforce as an individual contributor. That being said, I think it could be in everyone’s best interest to give employees the first hour (or half hour) of their day to get situated, check emails, reprioritize their day, prep for meetings, or just hit the ground running. (Of course, there are exceptions, like daily warehouse standups). But if I haven’t made it clear, I, personally, hate rolling out of bed and straight onto a call.
Once I’ve “settled in”, I like to start my week with a Co-founder Check-in. This ensures that my Co-founder(s) and I are attuned to one another’s needs, aware of any challenges, and aligned on what needs to happen.
Immediately after the Co-founder Check-in, we have a Leadership Team Meeting. I usually have any C-Level Executives or Heads of Departments in this meeting. Again, this ensures that we are all on the same page for the week and we can get ahead of any challenges.
Every week, I like to have an All Hands Meeting with everyone on staff. Employees are required to attend, and contractors are invited. I do this early on the first day of each week (after the Leadership Team Meeting).
I try to keep Team-specific Meetings at the same time each week. I usually schedule mine for Monday afternoons and Tuesday mornings, but another day may make more sense. For example, Product Retrospectives or Engineering Demo Days may make more sense on Thursdays or Fridays. In fact, host our Weekly Strategy Check-ins (for cross-functional strategic projects) on Thursdays.
I usually try to block all my 1:1s around the same time because I want to make sure I have enough time blocked off to actually do work. I like to meet with all my direct reports at least once a week, and I try to make time for indirect reports every so often. For some companies, this was once a month; others I met with once a quarter. If your company is really large, you may not have time to do this, but I suggest trying to find time to meet with everyone at least once.
At some companies, I even blocked off time for “walk-ins”. I wasn’t able to meet with all my employees on a regular basis, but I wanted to make myself available to employees who wanted to or needed to talk to me. I blocked off a few hours each week specifically for this purpose. You could also block time off for “customer calls” or “sales demos”, though it may be harder to stick to that schedule when working with 3rd parties. Alternatively, you can use my DNS trick:
Just as importantly as scheduling recurring meetings, I schedule “DO NOT SCHEDULE” time on my calendar. This ensures that I have time to <fill in the blank, e.g. eat lunch, go to the dentist, get work done>. I schedule time off for lunch every day, I schedule off all Wednesday, and I schedule a block of time off for Friday. Of course, there are emergencies that eat into my DNS time, but otherwise, I guard that time - you can’t expect other people to know when not to schedule stuff, and if you don’t make space to do work or eat lunch, you’ll lose it. I recommend all my employees block off DNS time, and I highly recommend it be at the same time for everyone each week, e.g. No Meeting Wednesday. Scheduling a standard DNS time makes scheduling meetings easier because not everyone has different DNS times, and if there IS an emergency All Hands, it will be easy to find time on everyone’s calendars.
💡TLDR: Meetings often get a bad rap, but if you keep them relevant and productive, they can be a great tool to run a great company.
📖 Exercise: Take a look at your current meetings. Identify which are relevant vs. which are fluff. Remove non-essential people from relevant meetings. Schedule recurring meetings when necessary. And schedule in DNS time.
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