Table of Contents
<aside> 💡
What to do ahead of our workshop?
</aside>
'How We Meet' is such a problem area for so many companies, but plays a crucial role in culture & company performance. From a sub-component level, we think about it like this:
📅 How we do meetings 👋 How we connect
<aside> ⚠️
Typical Problem: Who doesn’t go a day without hearing complaints about meetings?! 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 on any level? .. thought so. Let’s dive in.
</aside>
📅 The meetings you have, which are sync?, which are async? and what are they for?
Broadly speaking this component covers a few areas for us:
👉 Core, regular company-wide meetings (e.g. Town Halls) 👉 Core, regular team-level meetings (e.g. Stand-ups, 1:1s) 👉 Informal Socialising (e.g. Off-sites, Team Socials)
Note: Offsites are more likely to be something you design a little differently each time to meet business needs / context, but the below design principles & questions should still apply when you are
For all these, you want to be able to document & answer some basic Q’s together as a team (internally) and then be able to communicate that effectively externally so you attract the right kinda people for your business.
❓ Why does this exist? ❓ What are we actually trying to achieve with this? ❓ What format is it (synch/asynch) (& why?) ❓ How & When does it happen? (& why) ❓ Who is it for (& why) ❓ Where does it happen (& Why)
If you cant answer these Q’s yet, it might be a really useful exercise to reflect on these for all your meetings & offsites if you’re not starting completely from scratch and have some existing meetings/events in place that might not be working for you.
<aside> 💡
**Exercise Idea
Format:** Best done async via something like Miro Solution Approach: Co-Creation (Because this impacts everyone typically) Time Investment: 4-6 Hours for People Team \ 1 Hour for Other teams
**Step 1 - Audit (a.k.a. what do we do, where are the fires?)
//People Team - Pre-Facilitation** 👉 Map out every type of meeting that currently takes place in your business on a Miro board (Company, Team, & Social/Offsite). 👉 Bucket into: Company Wide (e.g. affects everyone) & team specific (engineering, sales). If similar formats are used for multiple teams then duplicate stickies across buckets (e.g. a ‘stand up’ sticky for each function so you can understand how meetings are working for different functions.
//Workshop- All Functions 🚥 In functional teams, heatmap your relevant stickies across 2 columns (Working, Not Working). If you’re doing this as a group, you could dot vote a little first to see where majority sentiment lies. You don’t need consensus, just some signal.
Can you answer the following for each one: ❓ Why does this exist? ❓ What format is it (& why?) ❓ How & When does it happen? (& why) ❓ Who is it for (& why) ❓ Where does it happen (& Why)
If not, why not? Encourage discussion, or input asynchronously if using something like Miro.
👉 For any identified as ‘Not Working’ spend some time adding additional sticky notes around those to tease out ‘why’ people feel they’re not working. You can use this to help in the next step…
**Step 2- Remove or Re-Design
//People Team**
Post-Workshop you should be able to build a heat-map to understand which meetings are working well, which aren’t & why. You now need to do a couple of things:
💡 This is a good opportunity to revisit some of the feedback from the previous stage you’ve had from folks about ‘why’ certain meetings aren’t working for them. It may be you see some patterns emerged that you can connect to one of the above, or something else.
🎯 Target Outcomes