Delete recurring meetings
Recurring meetings are problematic for a few reasons.
They’re meetings without an agenda. You dream up an agenda because you have the meeting. How messed up is that?
You usually mark them to the broadest audience possible, because of FOMO.
Many people don’t engage in these meetings because most of them are about “conveyance”. Remember the ConveRel quadrants? These should ideally be async.
This is not to say that recurring meetings have zero value. Some people enjoy these as a vehicle for team cohesion. After all, if you get a bunch of intelligent people together, you’re likely to have some interesting conversations. However the vast majority of recurring meetings lose their efficiency after the first few runs. The cost of the meeting far outweighs its marginal value. Before you know it, you see a majority of people attending these meetings with their mics and videos off, doing something else on the side. You can, of course, blame people for not running these meetings well. I suggest, instead, to fix the recurring nature of these meetings, which causes most of the problems. This is what Dropbox, Asana and Shopify did in their respective meeting resets.
Hard as it may seem, delete all these recurring meetings except for one-on-ones. In a remote setting, one-on-ones are an effective way to build relationships and to learn from each other. So don’t throw out the baby with the bath water.
If you’re leading a team and taking responsibility to shift-left, then you must inform stakeholders about this change with meetings. Here’s an example of such an email.
Keep stakeholders informed about no recurring meetings
Hi [Stakeholder name],
As you may be aware, we are making some changes to our ways of working, so the development team has fewer interruptions during the day and can be more productive. One action we’re taking is to make our meetings more effective. We realise that our recurring meetings aren’t as productive as we’d like them to be, so we’re removing them from our calendars as the first step of our reboot.
I assure you that as and when we need a meeting, we’ll set it up with a focussed group and a clear agenda. Please expect us to prepare for these meetings and to share relevant materials ahead of time, so you also have time to prepare. And yes, we’ll check your calendar before we block your time.
Cheers,
[Your name]