I’m curious to hear how others run their businesses, and what they’ve found to be best practices. Here’s what I’d ask:
How big is your team
How often do you meet (what days, when, who)
Include the purpose of the meeting
This is what our company has been:
We have 22 people (2 marketing, 2 sales, 7 engineering, 2 product, 6 content, 2 admin, 1 cx).
We have an executive team meeting on mondays for an hour. It’s intended to set the agenda for the week. There are 9 people who join this call
then TWThF we have a 30m standup with a subset of the exec team to cover key learnings, and align on specific daily actions. There are 6 in this call
on Wednesday we do a full team meeting, with all 22. We cover key initiatives, report on specific clients, review board meetings, key learnings, and share out on product updates. It’s an hour long
Candidly, I don’t love it, and it’s partially why I’m asking here, looking for some alternate ideas to consider that others may do more effectively.
@anticrash Tues through Friday standups seems excessive in comparison to my business. We are B2B industrial products in a niche market. I don't know what I would talk about on a daily basis.
With each team I have a 30min weekly meeting. Sales meeting can run over most weeks because of our long sales cycles and keeping things from falling through the cracks. Hopefully our new CRM helps with that.
Every week we have a company meeting for 30min. Everyother week is a celebration and the other weeks are Financials. Celebrate small victories, new clients, closed sales, outstanding efforts, promotions, events, no work accomplishments, etc. Financial weeks are our pipeline, overhead, warehouse, and product updates.
IMO, a critical part to that is that once the objective has been accomplished, then you're done. The meeting is over. If it's an hour meeting, and that only took 5 minutes, then it only took 5 minutes. So be it. You win. Go about your day.
And then if you've used up all the time and _not_ accomplished the goal, that's another problem to address.
It sounds like all of those meetings are "Decide" meetings. So what are you deciding? That's your goal. Get to that decision.
@anticrash I do a 30 minute meeting with my team (4 people) bi weekly and it’s more than enough. We are all in person and sit close to each other so we are pretty much always aligned, know what each other is working on, know what needs to be prioritized, ect.
There is no need for daily stand ups when your team is small and all sitting next to each other.
@tyrom0408 0-1 startup tech startup. There’s just way too much coordination and problem solving required, and trying to coordinate everything over zoom has been a nightmare.
There’s no such thing as a “quick conversation”, because everyone on the exec team is already on zoom trying to coordinate with their teams.
So then people are like “that’s what slack is for”, but then slack gets overrun with so many messages and channels, and then when you’ve been on back to back zoom calls for 4 hours, trying to catch up on what’s in slack is impossible.
In person, like 95% of these issues become non existent.
Don’t get me wrong—I think fully remote teams can work really well and be extremely effective, but there are conditions that have to be true—and in our instance, they were/are not.
@anticrash I left a hypergrowth startup scaling insane numbers that was 100% remote. This issue in a 2k person company.
The #1 lever to improve this that I saw was project management. Over communication is a side effect of disorganization. Your project management office (resources + project management + leadership + all operating systems used in the day to day) is likely where I’d look first.
Can everyone work heads down for a week and know exactly where to find what they need to complete deliverables? How do your issues flow through your overall business OS?
Just my first thoughts from experiencing this issue
@anticrash Hello,I'm researching how highly-effective organizations divide their leadership team meeting cadences and town halls. As organizations scale, they often times have various layers of leadership teams, from the C-level, SVP, VPs, etc - I'm wondering how organizations over 200 that work a hybrid model (remote + in office for certain days/locations) manage the meeting cadences between these groups as well as their all-staff meetings. Thanks!
