Make meetings less awful

To a person one of the biggest complaints among professional people is the number of meetings they attend. Instead of doing the work we should do, we spent our time "talking" about doing the work. I confess it is maddening. Today, I want to discuss the bane of any professional's existence. 

Work today is so complex that it requires specialized labor to get it accomplished. Thus, only some people know all the steps to complete a simple product like a pencil. Imagine the complexity needed to build a product like a banking application. It requires technology professionals, bankers, and attorneys because the regulations surrounding banking are rigorous. The number of people working on the project could be hundreds, and the teams could be anywhere worldwide. The only way to coordinate these people is to have periodic meetings to work out problems and ensure everyone has the same sense of urgency. 

What makes meetings so tedious is that many of them seem unnecessary. A public display of information or a well-written e-mail could reduce the meeting time. Unfortunately, the larger an organization, the more difficult it is to cultivate trust between disparate parts. People ignore e-mails, and the radiation of information creates political strife in organizations. So meetings are a way in low trust organizations to coordinate work. 

Agile uses retrospectives and sprint reviews to build trust by showing how work is progressing and exposing the workers to the people paying for the project. However, it triggered waves of despair from the development community because it was an additional meeting stacked on the current garden variety. When is work supposed to get done? I am sympathetic to this criticism of agile, but my experience for the last fifteen years has shown me that simple, focused meetings with a clear agenda make it possible to get work done. Meetings which exist for the same of having meetings are wasteful.

It is why if you are having a meeting, it should have a clear agenda. A meeting should either yield a decision or feature meaningful discussion. A proper agile retrospective allows the team to choose how the team should work and discuss the best strategy to complete those goals. A daily stand-up meeting is nothing more than the team discussing the day's events and making decisions for the next. Remember that the meeting is wasteful if you are not making a decision or having a meaningful conversation. 

Meetings also act as a means to mediate office politics and covey information up and down the chain of command. Thus, if you are in a forum with these goals, consider it your job to attend these meetings so your subordinates and superiors do not have to. You are a trusted vector of information, so following the session is purposeful and allows others to get work done. Those meeting types are less wasteful because you ate attending them instead of your entire team. 

Poorly run meetings could be better but are the best way to convey information in low-rust corporate environments. Make sure meetings have clear agendas. Productive meetings feature meaningful discussions or firm decisions. Finally, the meeting you are in frees up others to ensure work gets done. 

The corporate world has too many meetings, but following these simple guidelines will make them less awful.

Until next time.