Team meeting audit: 3 tests for an effective Meeting OS (and 4 steps to fix it!)

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Team meeting audit: 3 tests for an effective Meeting OS (and 4 steps to fix it!)

Part II: Take action

2. Minimize ad-hoc meetings

Great Meeting Operating Systems avoid ad-hoc meetings in favor of more recurring, predictable meetings.

Why minimize ad-hoc meetings?

Teams have different opinions on the value of ad-hoc meetings. Some teams try to intentionally keep calendars empty and default to just-in-time ad-hoc meetings. But for most teams, ad-hoc meetings are a negative indicator and should be minimized. There’s a great writeup on this in the

YouTube Hypergrowth doc⁠

, but the key idea is that ad-hoc meetings tend to be (a) less timely than necessary and (b) lack the behavioral rituals that come out of a recurring forum.

To state it differently, “can I get the 5 of us together to chat about X for 20 minutes” often takes much longer to schedule than expected, and often has unclear expectations. Of course, not all ad-hoc meetings are bad — meeting with a customer or candidate is often not recurring, and sometimes there just isn’t a natural or timely forum for a discussion.

For this exercise, we’re going to focus on evaluating our ad-hoc meetings and using it to spot gaps in our Meeting Operating System.

Step 1: Classify our own individual ad-hoc meetings.

Let’s start with each team member’s individual calendars.

The below table is filtered to show the ad-hoc meetings for each person. We will assign one of these designations to each ad-hoc meeting:

Ad-hoc meeting classification

Description

Ok!

Necessary ad-hoc meeting. No change needed.

Cancelable

We probably didn’t need to have it at all.

New recurring forum

We should create a new recurring forum for this.

Existing recurring forum

This should have been handled in one of our existing recurring forums [Note: indicate which existing forum in the next column]

No results from filter

⁠

Your ad-hoc meetings

Your ad-hoc meetings

Not synced yet

Event

Classify this ad-hoc meeting

If existing forum, which one?

No results from filter

⁠

Step 2: Reflect as a team on our classification distribution.

Here’s a summary of how we characterized our ad-hoc meetings as a group. Does this match our expectations?

⁠

Ad-hoc meeting classification

Description

Total Duration (hrs)

% of Duration

Ok!

Necessary ad-hoc meeting. No change needed.

4.00

33.33%

Cancelable

We probably didn’t need to have it at all.

2.00

16.67%

New recurring forum

We should create a new recurring forum for this.

2.25

18.75%

Existing recurring forum

This should have been handled in one of our existing recurring forums [Note: indicate which existing forum in the next column]

0.75

6.25%

Unclassified

3.00

25.00%

There are no rows in this table

12.00

Sum

100.00%

Sum

⁠

Step 3: Take action → Cancelable ad-hoc meetings.

Ready to make some changes! Let’s start with the

3

⁠

ad-hoc meetings that were classified as

Cancelable

⁠

. Here’s the list:

Who

Event

Classify this ad-hoc meeting

Retro prep

Cancelable

Sync with Jess

Cancelable

Alan <> Jess 1:1

Cancelable

No results from filter

⁠

We can’t go

back in time⁠

, but looking forward, what could you have done differently to make sure those meetings didn’t happen? Let’s discuss the list and add ideas for changes we’d like to make.

Add action idea for our cancelable ad-hoc meetings

⁠

Clear ideas

⁠

Action Idea

Author

Vote

Let's do this!

Can we move ad-hoc 1:1s to tag-ups?

I think async prep for retros would work.

No results from filter

⁠

Step 4: Take action → Requests for existing recurring forums.

Ok let’s move on to the

1

⁠

ad-hoc meetings that were classified as

Existing recurring forum

⁠

. The list below is sorted by which forum each meeting was tagged to:

Who

Event

Classify this ad-hoc meeting

If existing forum, which one?

Project sync

Existing recurring forum

No results from filter

⁠

Let’s discuss the list and add ideas for changes we’d like to make. Think about why these meetings were scheduled ad-hoc instead of as part of an existing forum — perhaps it’s just oversight? Or the existing forum needs a tweak in format/agenda/attendance/etc?

Add action idea for our existing recurring forums

⁠

Clear ideas

⁠

Action Idea

Author

Vote

Let's do this!

⁠

Robinhood wrote about

⁠

a cool technique for eliminating meetings.

Could we reserve some time in kick-off for project syncs?

No results from filter

⁠

Step 5: Take action → Requests for new recurring forums.

Ok last step: let’s talk about the

3

⁠

ad-hoc meetings that were classified as

New recurring forum

⁠

. Here’s the list:

Who

Event

Classify this ad-hoc meeting

Team retro

New recurring forum

Recruiting sync

New recurring forum

Team retro

New recurring forum

No results from filter

⁠

Let’s discuss the list and add ideas for changes we’d like to make. Note that we don’t have to accept all requests, and in some cases, multiple requests can be handled with the same Action Idea!

Add action idea for our new recurring forums

⁠

Clear ideas

⁠

Action Idea

Author

Vote

Let's do this!