Better Meetings Make for Better Days — 20 Super Tactical Ideas to Try Out With Your Team

“With the shift to remote work, most of the interpersonal interactions you have day-to-day are through Slack, email, Google Docs, and Zoom meetings. So it's very possible that for many employees, their only face-to-face human interaction for the day is through a meeting. If that meeting is good, then their day is good. If that meeting is bad, then their day is bad.”

We’ve been mulling over this point ever since HashiCorp’s Kevin Fishner brought it up when he stopped by our podcast earlier this year. Even as some return back to the office, this sentiment is more resonant than ever. Whether in a conference room or a Zoom room, it’s hard to overstate the impact meetings have on an employee’s day-to-day experience at a startup — and yet lately, many of us seem to be having more bad meetings that are adding up to more bad days.

Whether it’s quips on Twitter about the endless slog of back-to-back Zoom meetings, or well-worn one-liners such as “This could have been an email,” you would be hard-pressed to find another part of the workday that bears the brunt of more jokes, complaints and general discontent. (This recent example from Salesforce’s Bret Taylor is a worthy entry into the canon.)

To help you make more progress toward the elusive goal of running more effective team meetings that don't sap energy or waste time, we’ve combed through our archives to resurface best practices from some of the smartest leaders we've ever interviewed. 

Some of their advice offers up incredibly practical pointers around adjusting team meeting agendas or weaving in new questions; others center on reframing your own outlook so you can see these sessions in a new light. A few tidbits focus on how you can make existing meetings more effective, — or, thankfully, revisit and remove them all together.

Spanning across team offsites, stand-ups and 1:1s with your direct reports, as well as more specific arenas like product reviews and board meetings, each piece of advice was selected for its focus on helping you approach your regular meetings with more energy and intention.

As always, thank you for reading, listening and sharing! Got ideas for who we should feature or topics we should cover next? Drop us a line!

-The Review editors

Here's a sneak peek at the tips: 

- Tip #1: Set down your suitcase to avoid the spillover effect between meetings. "Whenever someone tells me a meeting was challenging, instead of asking why I’ll ask what happened right beforehand. Usually that’s where the real answer is. People go from meeting to meeting without thinking that one influences their performance or responses in another. We give ourselves zero transition time, and the result is emotional transference. Get intentional about setting this baggage aside. I tell my clients to imagine they are carrying suitcases and setting them down."— Katia Verresen, leadership coach

- Tip #4: Schedule time for gratitude. “We all hopped on Zoom, put some music on in the background, and then spent 90 minutes heads down on one exercise: Writing one line about every other person in the company and what we enjoyed about working with them. Then we collected all of these notes and rounded it up in one email for each person. So every person got to open an email with an amazing lineup of points of gratitude from their colleagues. I was really unsure how that was going to go over, to be honest, but it left people in tears." — Sitka CEO Kelsey Mellard

- Tip #7: Switch sides in a stalemate. "When you and your co-founder or a senior leader can’t agree on a key decision in a meeting, have the argument again, but switch sides. This practice loosens the attachment to being 'right,' helps you see the other’s perspective more coherently, and brings to light new points, which might make the best choice more clear." — Coa co-founder Dr. Emily Anhalt

- Tip #11: Break down big hairy goals by putting on your black hat. “Kick off new initiatives by asking a targeted tough question: 'Let’s assume that it’s one year from now and we’ve failed at our goal. What went wrong?' This question creates a subtle shift from a very optimistic mindset to triggering the team’s problem-solving neurons. It points them in the direction of trying to articulate the things that we don’t know yet.” — Mutiny's Jaleh Rezaei

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Recommended resources:

This read on walking as a productivity system.

This guide to an engineer’s self-review.

Why HashiCorp founder Mitchell Hashimoto is going back to an IC role.

The UX spectrum: mindset, not skillset

This thread on how founders can answer the "Why now?" question.

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