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This is a template for a culture design exercise we’ve used previously at Open Org to support People Teams on:

🎯 Building a clear view of which meetings are working, which aren’t and identify opportunities to either streamline, add or improve

🎯 Connecting culture design to business goals (e.g. Free {x hours} a week, improve engagement in calls, improve collaboration across time zones…)

🎯 Solve a problem linked to current meeting culture (E.g. We’ve freed up {x hours} in weekly calendars, We’ve redesigned town halls to help improve engagement / content absorption etc).

🆘 If you want a sounding board here we’re super happy to dive deeper over a coffee ☕. Book some time here.

Ready? Let’s go….

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🤷‍♂️ Why Is ‘How We Meet’ Important?

The topic of ‘Meetings’ has long been something of a burden for people teams and leaders trying to balance connection and productivity. This has been made even more complicated post 2020 with more mixed ways of working, but does also present us with an incredible opportunity to find new ways to connect without those potentially cumbersome meetings of old.

Ultimately though ‘how we meet’ impacts:

👉 Time, Money, Productivity 👉 Social Connection, Cohesion, Engagement 👉 Psychological Safety & Trust

All important right? And yet, many companies have problems with ‘how we do meetings’ which probably means they have problems with these things above too…

Key to doing this well is making sure you design this around your values & work environment (e.g. how globally distributed you are) but also how well you document & embed expectations around ‘how’ these meetings happen. Some things to ponder…

• What documentation do you have down around meetings right now?
  • What’s missing that could be a lever to improve or impact a problem here?
• How well have they been embedded & operationalised?
  • What do you do well? What don’t you do well?
• Have you jumped to any similar conclusions (💡) too rashly?
• When did you last properly review which meetings are serving your employees, and which aren’t?

Questions you could ask yourself…

• Is how we currently meet & connect appropriate for some of the non-negotiables of our business:
  • When & Where we work
  • Level of trust & autonomy / leadership style
  • Org structure
  • Values
• Should we design it differently based on the above, and if not, what are some of the things we might need to stay close to as we scale?

👀 Problems We See

📣 Frustration about time wasted together

📣 ”not another meeting!…”

📣 Struggles making meetings work across time zones

📣 Low engagement in meetings & off-sites

📣 No feeling of cohesion when are together

📣 Poorly designed approach to meeting culture that works across different functions

Resonate? ✅ Thought so… Let’s dive deeper…