How we increased productivity using meetings.

I don't know how you feel about meetings, but we started meeting regularly as a team a few years ago.

You could almost hear a synchronised groan occur across the team, followed by a Mexican-wave eye-roll around the room…

I get it, no one likes meetings. 

Especially not in the food industry. 

It’s probably one of the things we’re all running away from when we consider a career in the corporate world. 

But still, our company wasn’t small anymore.

I knew it was time to force ourselves to start behaving differently.

To make sure communication happened consistently, people shared ideas and there was a weight of group accountability pushing people to achieve more than they thought they could.

So we launched regular management meetings. 

But we instantly found it hard to stick to them.

Everyone saw them as a waste of time.

We tried shortening them, pausing them, renaming them, changing the attendees, or redefining the purpose of the meeting itself… 

And still, nothing stuck.

But then we realised we were just doing it wrong. 

We were using them as a way for people to verbally share what each person was doing. 

Going around the room and talking about (mostly) boring stuff no one cared about.

Everyone would get their 5-10 minutes, while everyone else sat there and listened. 

Inevitably, the loudest person stole most of the time which didn’t leave much room for discussion or debate around the good topics.

Sound familiar?

Well here’s what we did to transform our meetings and turn them into something we all look forward to each week. 

They’re faster, clearer and more actionable than ever.

The first thing we did was…

Stop Using Meetings For General Updates.

Meetings aren’t a great space for sharing lots of information. 

In fact, they suck for that. 

I believe that the best way to get loads of updates to people is still in written form so they’re forced to read it (often without distractions)

We use a shared Google doc with a template that just gets copied and pasted to a new page each week. 

Everyone has to fill in things like:

• Good News
• Shout Outs
• Observations
• BAU Updates
• Project Progress
• Actions They Want Others To Take

Everyone's report must be submitted by midday the day before a meeting so that others have time to read over it. 

This tiny step has helped us transfer more information amongst ourselves AND run better meetings than anything else we’ve tried.

The next step is…

Assigning Meeting Roles

Who’s running the meeting and who’s taking notes?

We started by sharing the roles around on a monthly rotation so that everyone got a chance to learn. 

The main job is the Chair of the meeting. 

The person who looks at all the notes the day before and creates the meeting agenda. 

In my case, I look at all the notes on a Monday afternoon and pull important topics from everyone’s notes to create an agenda. 

I select some good news, topics we needed clarification on, and ideas we needed to explore and align on a deeper level.

Most of them are topics that impact the whole team and not just an individual. 

(those chats can happen on the side)

The next step was…

Time Keeping

In the Google doc, I share the meeting agenda and assign a certain amount of time to each topic so we don’t get off track. 

If we don't resolve it in the allocated time, we form a break-out roundtable on another day to make sure we get to the bottom of the problem quickly.

These roundtables are normally only a few of us to protect everyone else's time and we report back (digitally) to the rest of the team to keep them in the loop with the outcome. 

And there you have it. 

If you only remember one thing from this email it's this:

Don't use meetings for detailed updates.

By pushing personal updates and BAU information to written reports so that you can use meetings for alignment on shared projects, you'll get more results, faster. 

I hope it helps!