Reset your meeting culture
Part 1: Structurally refreshing your meeting cadence
Earlier this year, I found myself in a 20-person daily standup. Looking around the Zoom grid, the dynamic didn’t feel right. Engagement was minimal, energy felt low, and the content covered usually didn’t apply to all the attendees. Even though the meeting was “only” 30 minutes, the meeting cost was astronomical — in pure dollars, it would easily be close to $1,000 a day, $5,000/week, or $20,000/month. Was it worth it?
“Time is money” — make it count
I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently thinking about meetings, meeting culture, and how to run them more effectively. Starting today and over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing a 3-part mini-series on how to have higher quality and effective meetings. Here’s what to expect:
Part 1: RESET - Structurally refreshing your meeting culture 👈 You are here!
Part 2: RUN - Tactical advice for how to run effective meetings
Part 3: DEVELOP - Tips for getting the most out of 1:1s
Let’s get into it!
🧐 How we redesigned our meeting culture
Though Abridge is a fully-remote and distributed company, we were indexing too heavily on synchronous communication to disseminate information and status. Even worse, we were spending face-to-face time catching people up on context, instead of higher value decision-making. We needed a way to encourage more asynchronous communication, and make our synchronous time more valuable. But how to begin?
Tip #1: Start with a meeting audit
To figure out what types of meetings we still found worthwhile, we took stock of our collective meeting stack and asked ourselves:
“What do current meetings try to accomplish?”
Actually taking stock of the various types of content covered helped us quickly bucket the types of issues we were regularly spending synchronous time on.
Next, we asked ourselves a simple, but powerful question:
"Could this happen async?”
After a couple iterations, we crossed out status updates and context sharing, and landed on 4 categories of meetings that still felt extremely valuable to hold face-to-face (or on Zoom):
📝 Meetings to make decisions + evolve strategy
e.g. meeting to figure out “How might we de-risk elements of our plan?” or “Does it make strategic sense to prioritize feature A over feature B?”
🚀 Meetings to accelerate velocity of learning
e.g. retrospectives, experiment analyses and next steps, weekly demo sessions to share work in flight
🧠 Meetings to jam together + gather input
e.g. brainstorming sessions
🤝 Meetings to develop people, teams, and relationships
e.g. 1:1s, feedback, team bonding / social time
In reflecting on why these meetings felt worthwhile to have synchronously, I think a large part is that they tend to be momentum- and energy-creating.
At the same time, it didn’t feel like just identifying worthwhile meeting categories was enough to reset our culture. We wanted a more structural way to force people to rethink their meetings.
Tip #2: Experiment with a variety of ways to move context-sharing and updates async
As an organization, we relied heavily on Slack as a communication tool, but did not have a practice of regularly sending out updates to keep people in the loop. With being more intentional about shifting context-sharing to async, we tried the following tactics:
We encouraged people to shift more communication from DMs into public channels so others can follow-along.
We created a #decisions channel to communicate out important decisions that the company should be aware of.
For each meeting, we made sure someone was tasked w/ sending out a meeting readout afterwards (nothing onerous — just the main punchline and next steps).
Things are still work in progress (especially in regards to what conversations should be in public channels vs. DMs), but we’ve heard very positive feedback from the use of the #decisions channel and with closing the loop on things with meeting readouts.
Most of what happens in Slack is written; however, we also wanted to experiment with other methods of quickly sharing context, rather than relying solely on written communication to convey ideas and thoughts. Different people have different preferences for consuming and learning content, and so we tried a few other ways to disseminate information:
We used Geekbot to run async standup updates in Slack. We had middling success with this — not because async standup is inherently worse, but likely because there were too many people in the channel when we tried this (and therefore the burden of keeping up with all the standup posts was very high). This is something we’d be open to continuing to experiment with again in the future, with smaller teams.
We encouraged people to create Loom videos to share information in cases where the visual of a screen recording could be helpful. Some people have taken to Loom more than others, but we’ve found that the most compelling use cases for this includes product or work-product walkthroughs, sharing demos of our product with others, and creating tutorials that can live in our team Notion wiki and help memorialize knowledge.
We experimented with sharing audio memos in Slack to quickly catch people up. Speaking is faster than typing, and voice memos have been a great tool to share feedback and reactions much faster. (This is recommended more for DMs rather than group channels).
Some of these tactics have worked better than others in terms of organizational stickiness over time. However, the practice of regular experimentation here has meant that on the whole we’ve definitely seen an improvement in terms of context being shared async. Importantly, continuing to invest in async communication (and reminding people that we want to share context async) has helped us shift our meeting time to be more focused on higher-value items (strategy, decision-making, etc.).
Tip #3: Blank slate your calendar
I’ve been at companies that send around periodic reminders for how to run effective meetings. While this can be one tactic in helping people remember meeting best practices, we wanted to shake things up more dramatically.
To accomplish this, we decided on a meeting “reset” and wiped all recurring meetings off the calendar.
While this sounds extreme, it was also an extremely effective way to get people to shift from reactively attending whatever meetings were already on the calendar to being more proactive about how to use the time. It actively encouraged people to rethink what might actually be necessary.
Once we had a more meeting-free calendar, it was easier to identify key gaps in communication and rituals. We could re-think our tactics for better communication, and — where it made sense — re-introduce a meeting (with a more laser targeted agenda, set of participants, and goals).
Tip #4: Set recurring meetings to expire
Recurring meetings can lose steam over time. For example, someone may have initially thrown regular time on cals to kickstart a project, but then the meeting lost value over time as things became more established, the team composition changed, or for other reasons.
A structural way to defend against this is to set an expiration date on recurring meetings (a good starting point is 4-6 weeks). The meeting automatically disappearing from calendars is a good nudge for folks to reconvene and question whether or not the meeting is still serving its intended purpose.
In one case I observed, the meeting expiring led to some frantic “What happened to this meeting?” and “How will we coordinate the work?” messages being sent. It was clear that some folks felt anxious that this meeting had inexplicably disappeared from their cals. If that feeling occurs, it’s a clear signal that the meeting is still valuable!
Of course, there are less drastic ways of doing this… like setting a reminder for 6 weeks out to “Reassess meeting value.” However, I think the potential thrash from a an expired meeting is more likely to galvanize regular introspection and change.
Note: 1:1s are the one meeting I do not recommend expiring — regularly hosted 1:1s have been shown to boost engagement and trust!
Tip #5: Cluster team meetings to protect maker time
One of the most painful types of meeting schedules is when you have a meeting, followed by 30 min of free time, followed by another meeting, followed by another short break. The 30 minute breaks are often not enough time to get a significant task done, and context switching is inefficient and painful — especially when certain functions like engineering and design require blocks of deep thought.
When thinking through meeting cadence holistically, it can be helpful to think through clustering team meetings during a certain block of time so that large swaths of the day are preserved for maker time. (If you haven’t read Paul Graham’s iconic Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule before, it’s definitely worth a read). It’s also worth attempting to jenga your calendar to try to stack meetings into a more contiguous block.
At Abridge, we’ve been very intentional about scheduling team meetings in the mornings, leaving ample chunks of time in the afternoon for maker time. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many people in the company that they have a strong preference for segmenting the calendar in this way and absolutely love having afternoons free.
In terms of other ways to think about designated maker time, I know that some companies will also designate meeting-free days (e.g. “meeting-free Wednesday”), and I am interested in giving this a try sometime soon.
Tip #6: Don’t be afraid to cancel meetings
My husband recently joked, “The most efficient meeting is a canceled one.” People rarely complain about getting time back, so sometimes it makes sense to just cancel a meeting if there isn’t anything pressing on the agenda to discuss.
As a close corollary, for every meeting on your calendar, it’s helpful to ask yourself:
“Do I need to be in this meeting?”
Speed is everything in startups, and in many cases, it can make sense divide and conquer among participants. Before you join a meeting, running this quick litmus test on yourself and others can help everyone free up time and go faster.
⚔️ Defending against calendar bloat
It’s easy to stack meetings without much thought, and the meeting accumulation over time can start to feel heavy. People can feel very tied to existing meetings (change can be uncomfortable!), but when things start to look too crazy, I recommend just ripping the bandaid off and making some radical changes to reset the norms.
However, just resetting isn’t enough — to maintain a culture of sharing info async + having effective meetings, it’s also helpful to have champions across the organization who can remind people of best practices from time to time. These are people who will ask, “Who can summarize this in #decisions?,” or proactively remind people “No need to attend — we’ll send the recap later!)”
For making habits stick, it’s even better if there are structural habits to make the cognitive load of meeting running SUPER easy — (e.g. baking in meeting norms into a new employee onboarding session, or setting up agenda templates for new meeting invites).
Speaking of recaps, here’s the quick summary of the litmus tests and tips I’ve used for periodic meeting maintenance:
Run a calendar audit to understand what topics your recurring meetings currently cover. Next, ask yourself: “Can this be done async?”
Push as much communication async as possible, and experiment with different modes of communication to make it happen.
Nuke your calendar from time to time and remove all recurring meetings to encourage people to really think through whether they need the meeting.
Don’t be afraid to cancel meetings that have outlived their worth. Better yet, set recurring meetings to expire after a certain number of weeks (a systematic way to force you to rethink whether or not the meeting is still needed).
Be intentional about preserving maker time. If meetings are necessary, try to cluster them in one time block.
It’s ok to RSVP “no.” Ask yourself: “Do I need to be in this meeting?”
As always, I’d love to hear your tips and spicy takes on meeting management. What’s been effective for you?
And if you enjoyed this content, stay tuned for Part 2: RUN - Tactical advice for how to run effective meetings!
Happy Meeting!
A big thank you to Steve Magoun, VP of Engineering at Abridge, for sharing thoughts on this topic and draft!
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