Recurring meetings can eat away at your schedule; constantly evaluate their effectiveness.
We’ve all been there… your calendar is backed up and all you see on your two week horizon is a stack of recurring meetings.
It’s important to understand how we get into this situation in the first place and what we can do to trim down recurring events to reclaim that time.
Best Intentions
Stop me if this sounds familiar…
A meeting is called to gather stakeholders to address a specific need. The meeting achieves it’s goal but there are lingering issues. The team decides to meet again the following week to close them out. That meeting is effective and the team decides to run it back again. The team slips into a comfortable norm and now every attendee in that meeting has a recurring event on their calendar…. indefinitely!
From there, two things tend to happen over time:
- Purpose Evolves: The purpose of the meeting evolves and new people get invited. The problem that the meeting initially addressed becomes obscured and the team loses sight of why they were meeting in the first place.
- People Start To Go Through The Motions: People attend the meeting because it provides a level of comfort and has become habit. The team starts to go through the motions instead of getting things accomplished.
A Recent Example
Our team has a backlog grooming meeting every two weeks. We initially met because our backlog was becoming unruly. Over time, new teammates became involved and the recurring meeting grew in size and scope. New stakeholders brought their own agendas and the meeting morphed into a feature and resource request meeting.
One day we had yet another new attendee. As we described the purpose of the meeting, it became apparent that the original intention of the meeting and our actual output had diverged.
We decided to use our next meeting to reflect. We took time as a group to think about what we all wanted out of our time together. We took a hard look at whether or not all attendees received value from being there and whether we needed to kill the meeting altogether.
We came out of that with a smaller group and now use the time as it was initially planned. The result:
- A number of teammates across the organization recovered an hour of their bi-weekly schedule.
- We were able to refocus on one of our most pressing issues - the backlog!
A note on recurring meetings vs Agile rituals
While no recurring meeting is above reflection, there are Agile rituals (Sprint Planning Meetings, Daily Stand-Ups, Retrospectives) that “should” fall on a designated cadence. That said, if a daily stand-up isn’t working for your team, talk about it with your teammates and find out if the format can be tweaked.
The goal should be effectiveness and velocity. If parts of the Agile process are getting in the way of that, scrap them!
Some Tips
I have found the following tips effective when reflecting on recurring meetings:
- Even if you aren’t facilitating a meeting, make sure it has a tight agenda. Agendas focus attention on a specific problem and get the team to think through concrete solutions.
- Before walking into a recurring meeting, make sure you are clear on the problem the meeting was designed to solve. Make sure the team comes out of the meeting with adequate progress on a solution. If
- Take a hard look at the time spent in a particular meeting and see how it stacks up to the output generated from it.
- Try a quarterly reset. Wipe your slate clean of recurring meetings each quarter to force you and your team to think about what truly needs recurring attention.
Be defensive about your how you spend your time. There is only so much to go around, and ensuring you make the most of it is of the upmost importance.
