Meetings as the last resort, not the first option
Meetings are counter productive to an asynchronous work culture and have a huge cost. Take the following steps to be pragmatic about meetings.
- Use the ConveRel quadrants to guide which situations actually merit meetings.
- When you do meet, follow the recommended best practices to make meetings effective.
- Dont lose your humanity in the process. Make time for team bonding, in person or online.
In the last two years of the remote work revolution, it’s clear that productivity goes up when people have the choice to work from anywhere. In 2021, I did some research for a respected technology firm to understand their state of remote work. I surveyed more than a third of the firm, which was a large, randomised, representative sample. Over 700 people responded to the survey. The results are what you’d imagine.
81%
people were just as satisfied or more satisfied with their jobs since they started working remotely.
92%
people believed that the quality of their work had improved or remained the same as a consequence of remote work.
55%
people had a day that extends beyond 9 hours on average.
66%
people believed they were working more than compared to before the pandemic.
76%
believed they were in more meetings as compared to before the pandemic.
You may remember me mentioning the concept of “flow” in the first article.
“… a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
You’ll also remember how stark the results of the survey I recently did were - while 97% of the people I surveyed claimed to care about flow; only 12.5% - i.e. one in eight people actually claimed to achieve it with regularity. And what was the number one obstacle to achieving flow? One word - “meetings”.
So it’s clear that we need to have fewer meetings. This is step one to being asynchronous, and I’d argue that it’s the most important step to take if you want to be a productive, remote-first organisation. In today’s post, I’ll outline a framework for you to figure out which meetings you need and which ones you can get rid of. Let’s get started.
The ConveRel quadrants
The ConveRel quadrants
This is not an original framework. I chanced upon it in The Anywhere Operating System, by Luke Thomas and Aisha Samake. It’s such a simple and powerful framework that I think it deserves a visualisation and a memorable name. A classic 2x2 matrix, the two axes are as follows.
The “Conve” axis
The book says that at a high level, you can break communication down into two parts.
Conveyance. As you may expect, this is mostly unidirectional information transfer. For example, a status update.
Convergence. This happens when two or more people need low latency, high bandwidth exchange of ideas to come to a shared understanding. For example, using available information to make a collective decision.
The “Rel” axis
This axis quantifies the strength of the relationship across a wide spectrum.
A weak relationship. This is often the case between people who haven’t worked with each other for very long or even if they have, they haven’t had the chance to lay down ways of working together.
A strong relationship. Such relationships often exist between high-performing teams and individuals inside and across organisations who’ve built a strong camaraderie working together.
Now that you have visualised the matrix, let’s use it to decide which meetings are necessary and which ones you can do without.
| Quadrant | Strategy |
|---|---|
| 1. Conveyance - strong relationship | Default to async This is as straightforward as it gets. If the information is unidirectional, remember that people can read faster than they listen. Moreover an asynchronous artefact is persistent, editable, and allows for more in-depth, inline interactions - e.g. questions about the content. |
| 2. Conveyance - weak relationship | Build the relationship with the aim to move async While nothing changes with the information between quadrant 1 and 2, sharing information in a meeting is a contrivance to build a working relationship. As the relationship gets stronger, you shouldn’t need these meetings any more. |
| 3. Convergence - weak relationship | Default to sync Without established ways of working it’s tough to enforce a diligent culture where people prepare for a meeting and make the most of synchronous time. Many work relationships will start here, and trying to rush through this stage may be counter productive. So it’s ok to default to meetings here, as long as you also commit to improving the relationship as you go. |
| 4. Convergence - strong relationship | Prepare async; synthesise inputs and then go sync While it’s likely that these interactions will need a meeting, it’s crucial that everyone does some legwork to make that meeting effective. This means that everyone who attends needs to study the relevant information. You may need conveyance leading up to the point of convergence. Sweat those details. One way of ensuring that people consume all the necessary information before getting into a decision is to adopt the 6-page memo pattern from Amazon. More on this shortly. |
Making meetings effective
If you follow through with the rule of “Meetings as the last resort, not the first option.”, you’ll reduce the number of meetings for your team in a big way. Your next task is to ensure that the meetings you actually have are productive. There are a few simple things you can do.
Answer the big questions. What’s the purpose of the meeting and what’ll happen next? This should be clear on your meeting agenda. And yes, promise yourself never to set up meetings without an agenda.
Keep the size of the meeting down. Choose the smallest group of people necessary for the meeting and eschew blanket invites. Over eight people, and your meeting is likely to be a waste of time.
Make it active. Don't waste time with presentations. Distribute the decks and videos in advance to save everyone's time. If people don’t have a reading habit, then set aside the first few minutes for people to consume the background information in silence.
Implement good decision hygiene. Guard against the anti-patterns of meetings where groups succumb to groupthink and bias cascades. Allow everyone the time to silently write their points of view about the decision before diving into an intense discussion. Determine the factors that should influence the decision and the weight-age each of them should carry. Delay intuition until you’ve allowed all the data and viewpoints to surface. Don’t let just System 1 run your meetings.
Document it for everyone else. You can use automated tools or DIY, but whatever you do, show empathy for the people who weren’t in the conversation. Make it easy for them to consume the outputs. Brevity, structure and simplicity are important characteristics of meeting minutes as well. Sending out just a meeting recording is insensitive. It’s an optional extra, but not a substitute for a succinct summary.
Be human
While you work hard to reduce team meetings, don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re all human. We like social interactions. Meeting people in person or online is great to build the relationships that’ll take you to the right of the ConveRel spectrum. So there are some meetings that I think you should always have.
One on one (1:1) catch-ups. Use these to check on each other, identify areas of common interest, to support each other and to get to know each other. Gossip is fair game as well. Sure you can talk about work too, but if you’ve been communicating asynchronously about that, then you can focus these conversations on your work relationship.
Team activities. Now and then, consider getting together as a team to either play a game or do an activity like an Airbnb experience together. Discover each other’s hidden talents. Shared experiences build team culture and bonding, so find opportunities to create different, fun experiences for the team. This is important for your company as well, so find a budget for it. That way, people don’t have to pay out of their own pockets for such events.
Meet up in person. When possible, meet your colleagues in person for coffees, lunches, dinners, sports games, movies or other activities. If your company sponsors it, organise a meetup where you fly everyone into a specific location. Remember that you’re doing this to build camaraderie, so don’t stuff work into the meetup. If you’re used to working remotely, this’ll just be inefficient. Instead, curate social experiences for the team. Who knows, you may find friends for life!
If you’re working in a mostly synchronous environment, this shift will not be easy. You’ll have to work with your colleagues to make tiny shifts left along the spectrum of synchronousness. I suggest aiming for small wins as you go along this journey. Every shift left is a win - celebrate it with your team. And I mean, celebrate! Point it out in your weekly reflections and tag the cheerleaders for shifting left. Keep mapping your interactions on the ConveRel quadrants and ask yourself if you’re using the most effective means of communication for the purpose.
When you meet, make sure you get the most out of that time together. A one hour meeting for eight people is not a one hour meeting at all. It’s an eight-hour meeting. Multiply that with salaries for internal employees or with opportunity costs to surface the true cost of meetings. We just can’t be trigger-happy with these costly interactions.
Of course, don’t lose your humanity in the process. You can plough back some of your time savings into actually building relationships with your teammates.