The 6 Things Teams Are Changing to Make Meetings More Productive

Meetings are likely consuming over 30% of your “get the work done” time, or even worse, creating a culture where team members associate meeting time with productivity and view the hours in between as “free”.

So, who and when should be getting the work done?

In recent months, we’ve discussed this issue with several organizations experiencing a decline in productivity. Teams often claim, “I’m really busy today,” when they have numerous meetings, believing they’ll have a better day without them. However, meetings are primarily for decision-making and progress, NOT where work typically gets done. “Should our busiest days be meeting days?”

Without delving into the specifics of that discussion or the results, we leave it to you to share your thoughts and observations about your team in the comments.

Instead, we’d like to share some solutions and offer an ultimate guide to help you reduce meeting frequency, shift the culture away from viewing meetings as the primary responsibility, and provide tips and resources for leading more #productivemeetings.

So, what can you find here:

• How to say goodbye to unproductive meetings with a simple framework your team can remember?
• How to assess the productivity of your current meetings?
• How can you transition some of your meetings asynchronously?
• How can you establish team norms that foster a culture of productivity and growth?
• What conditions need to be met for this to succeed?
• What are the guidelines and principles you should have or consider during meetings?

Let’s go over the details!

1. How to say goodbye to unproductive meetings with a simple framework your team can remember?

We’ve all attended meetings that we’ve deemed unproductive. You probably thought, “Why was I even invited to that meeting?” or “This was a waste of time.” “He didn’t facilitate the meeting, and we didn’t make any progress, so will we have this conversation over and over again next week?”

These are just a few of the comments we hear every time we visit and evaluate an organization, so you are not alone.

To be honest, some team members have never received any training on how to lead meetings. Even for those to whom it may come naturally, it’s still a skill that others may need to learn or understand the framework of a good meeting.

Without delving into the details and allowing you to learn more about this framework in another blog post, there is a framework that we have designed that is easy to remember and can be applied to most meetings, improving meeting productivity immediately. This framework was designed by Ro Fernandez, our CEO.

The basis of productive meetings is simple — follow the OFQ Framework. There are just 3 things you have to remember!

(O)bjective

(F)eelings

(Q)uestions

In general — during meeting you need to clearly define the objective of the meeting. “What are you trying to achieve with the meeting?”

Secondly, during all meetings, you will have to be able to read the room and get a sense of how people are feeling about the discussion/topic. Are they concerned? Do they think you are moving in the right direction? Are they burnt out or feeling stressed out?

And third, the person leading the meeting needs to ask at least 3 questions to encourage all participants to share their input and for the leader to evaluate their own assumptions. The objective is never to be right, but quite the opposite — to spark something in participants’ minds so you find the gaps, risks, and in a way, prove yourself “wrong” to avoid mistakes and mitigate risks early on.

You can watch this video or share this video with your team.

2. How to assess the productivity of your current meetings?

Sometimes, a good starting point for any process improvement is to evaluate how things are currently going and empower all employees, including managers, to adapt to a new approach to work. They should be encouraged to ask questions on a monthly basis to their team members to see how they can improve.

“Can you rate this meeting from one to five, with five being very productive and engaging?”

Team members, in this case, should approach meetings with the mindset that there are always ways to improve. All team members, including managers and directors, should show up with the same mindset and need for improvement.

To be more specific, if you and your team want to improve at leading meetings, start asking questions like: “Can you rate this meeting from one to five, with five being very productive and engaging?”

We call these meetings PI meetings, and in our team, we encourage our members to evaluate their meetings at least once a month.

When we assist organizations or teams in transitioning to a more productive way of collaborating and leading meetings, we encourage teams to ask this question in each meeting for the first week and evaluate the ratings for each department and each type of meeting. Use this as a starting point to discuss with the team which meetings are effective and which ones need improvement. Make them acknowledge that there is a problem that the team or company wants to address.

After this, for example, you can introduce the OFQ framework to the team and ask them to follow it for a certain period.

During this period, it’s important that someone at the team or company level acts as the responsible party for this transition and makes themselves available to the team to help them and answer questions.

In you are watching the video you can also encourage the team to use a collaborative space like Nova to lead those meetings, take notes and to encourage team members, clients and overall stakeholders to participate.

3. How can you transition some of your meetings asynchronously?

Now, in the last two years, organizations have been canceling some of their meetings and transitioning some to asynchronous formats. You can find a lot of resources on our blog about this, including all the details about which meetings should be conducted asynchronously and how to implement this transition gradually.

To keep this post a bit shorter, here are a few notes.

To mention a few interesting ideas, in 2019, the director of the pharmaceutical organization that created the COVID vaccine classified meetings into three categories:

1. Informative meetings: Meetings used to share information about a topic and update, etc. These meetings were fully canceled, and other methods had to be used to inform the team or stakeholders.
2. Opinion meetings: Meetings to discuss initial opinions, these are canceled or reduced to a minimum, and …
3. Decision meetings: These can be maintained. On the other hand, Shopify, at the beginning of 2023, decided to remove all their recurring meetings, that means over 12,000 meetings. After a few months, they evaluated if any had to be re-added to their calendar and after a deep evaluation, they were able to eliminate 30% of those recurring meetings.

Informative meetings.

Meetings that have the sole objective to inform a team or stakeholders about a new proposal, changes in the project or organization, updates, etc. Overall, one person tends to share the information while everyone is listening (actively or passively), and often there is no participation required from the participants in the meeting.

These meetings can be easily canceled and moved into other formats. You can consider the following.

• Email: Send an email to team members and stakeholders to inform them.
• Loom or any other video recording platform: Send a video recording sharing the information. This lets you share information in a similar way you will share that information during a meeting. You can share your screen and speak during the video.
• Nova + video recording platform (Loom): Send an informative session and invite team members and stakeholders to join during a specific period; for example, you can schedule it that stakeholders watch it before Wednesday next week, and additionally, you can track who has watched it and even ask questions and add a space for comments. The PROS are that this method is ideal when you want to ensure people stay informed before a specific date or you want to know who is informed.

To learn more about this read this blog post.

Opinion meeting.

These meetings can be categorized as those where you are gathering ideas, learning about different opinions and needs, discussing, and helping move gather information or input to get something done.

This can include meetings like the ones mentioned below:

• Brainstorming meetings: Meetings in which team members or stakeholders are sharing ideas. Often the ideas tend to be raw and need further evaluation and considerations.
• Discussion meetings: Meetings where you are discussing the “problem” to better define a solution, where you are discussing the plan, discussing or exploring multiple alternatives, etc.
• Feedback meetings: Meetings in which you have a proposal, idea, project, plan, design, etc., and you want to share it to gather input and feedback, to evaluate if there is anything missing, if you are moving in the right direction and even to reduce risks. Often also have the intention to get stakeholders involved to get their buy-in.

4. Establish team norms that foster a culture of productivity and growth.

Ground rules or team norms helps set a tone of mutual respect, and protects team members from unfair processes.

Here are a few examples:

👉 Two pizza rule: No meeting should have more than two pizzas could feed — outside of team building activities.

👉 Meeting-objective: All meetings should include the objective of the meeting. If the meeting doesn’t define the objective of the meeting people can choose to do something else with their time. Is that more work for you? Yes! That’s the point — We only have meetings if it is truly needed.

👉 ‘No Meetings [day] ‘ norm is designed to give people more control of their calendars and more time to work without interruptions.

👉 If it is your meeting to run, manage the conversation. Make it clear who is leading the meeting and whom it is to serve. Watch out for assertive ‘fast talkers’ and for ‘topic slips’ — and be careful not to lose personal responsibility via group decision-making.

👉 The person leading the meeting needs to ask at least 3 questions during the meeting that directly should help them achieve the objective of the meeting.

👉 Decisions and knowledge should be accessible and collective: All meeting decisions, as well as decisions made outside meetings during “private conversations,” need to be documented and accessible to all stakeholders of the project, client, etc. Define how and where this will be done; for example, if you are using Nova, ask your team to add all conclusions inside Nova.

5. What conditions need to be met for this to succeed?

When you start thinking about how to implement this, whether you are just considering moving some meetings asynchronous or aiming to make meetings more productive, there are a few things that must be true.

These are essentially the conditions we consider necessary for success:

• Leaders or the leadership need to lead by example: When we aim to change things at the organizational level, leaders must be the first to learn and follow these practices. This doesn’t mean that individuals can’t follow these practices; as an individual, you can. In fact, a few team members will likely join you because you will be saving a lot of time.
• Goals, expectations, and responsibilities must be clear: Because we have become so reliant on meetings to deliver work, we have to change habits. To achieve this, we must be able to define deadlines, track participation, and clarify roles and responsibilities.

Wodtke, in her book, explains some practical tools and rituals to help teams set and track their objectives. We agree with her on a lot of these aspects and we love the way she created this:

• Forecast for the month: “What should your team know is coming up that they can help with, deliver, or prepare for?” Explore how each department or team can meet monthly to define their deliverables for the month and forecast their work.
• Monday commitments: Intentions for the week — what are the three or four most important things you must get done this week toward the Objective of this month? You can do this asynchronously. Create a group chat or Slack channel for this purpose.
• Friday wins or Kudos: In the Friday wins session, all teams demo whatever they can or share what they have achieved (e.g., Sales, Customer Support), all to encourage people to continuously seek (small) wins to share. This can also be done asynchronously. If you do it in a kudos format, you are also expressing gratitude to team members who helped that week.
• If you have a lot of meetings choose one day as the #meetingfree day

Among these mentioned items, the monthly meeting to discuss objectives and deliverables for the month is crucial.

If you are looking for a template, at Nova, we have a few. For example, check out this one where each team member will list their deliverables for the month — things they need to start this month but not necessarily finish — and also allow them to forecast what else is happening or on their mind and add it to the “on my radar” section.

Min: 2:10

This template helps the team discuss priorities with the manager and document them.

6. What are the guidelines and principles you should have or consider during meetings?

As previously mentioned, obtaining consent for ground rules helps establish a tone of mutual respect. When establishing norms for your team, it’s beneficial to also define rules for meetings. Let’s review a few!

Here are the four guidelines I frequently utilize:

1. Be human first: Prioritize treating yourself and others with kindness and respect, valuing each person as an individual before considering their job titles.
2. Stay present: Keep distractions such as phones and laptops aside during the session, attending to them only in urgent situations.
3. Trust: Have faith in me as your facilitator, trusting that I’ve structured the workshop agenda to maximize our time together.
4. Be open: Embrace the diversity of perspectives and ideas present within the group, as the true magic happens when we remain receptive to each other’s contributions and you approach discussions with curiosity.

Additionally, for virtual sessions, I include the following:

1. Keep your camera on and mic unmuted (whenever feasible): This fosters a sense of togetherness and enables us to interpret each other’s non-verbal cues.
2. Turn off self-view: Encouraging a more natural interaction by removing distractions posed by our own mirrored images, allowing us to focus on others.
3. No multitasking: Acknowledge that our presence and time are valuable resources; splitting attention detracts from both personal and group engagement. (Note: While we can’t completely disconnect from technology as suggested in “stay present” above, as it’s necessary for virtual sessions, the emphasis remains on minimizing distractions.)

Other consideration…

1. Misspell with confidence: Recognize that while readability is important, spelling is not a priority. Shift focus to the broader concepts rather than fixating on minor errors.
2. You can draw: Challenge the misconception that drawing is exclusive to creative individuals. Utilize visual aids to effectively convey ideas, emphasizing that it’s about communication rather than artistic ability.

Don’t hesitate to share this post with your colleagues and fellow team members. Let’s empower each other to elevate our meetings and enhance our collective success.

Together, we can make a difference!