Don’t Drop Your Work Meetings – Rather, Build a System for Them

Currently, we see that more and more large companies are reducing or even completely eliminating work meetings. For instance, Shopify has recently cut off all recurring meetings that include more than two people and drastically limited all others.

But given the economy’s recession, does it mean all companies should follow suit and delete the majority of meetings from the calendar? As to all the questions that sound like, "Should I do something because everyone else is doing it?" – the answer is no.

At Refocus, 90% of the team works completely remotely. The remaining 10% who live in the cities where our offices are located ) are not obliged to go to the office – although they could come 1-2 times per week if they wish. The majority of business decisions are made online, which is pretty logical.

Here's how we managed to build a system for work meetings that allow our team from GMT+1 to GMT+8 time zones to collaborate effectively and earn more than $4.5M since launching from the ground up last January 2022.

We all can text. Why even have meetings?

Corporate messengers are key to organized communication, so it’s crucial to negotiate that everyone can be reached there and will, with some rare exceptions, answer a message within a couple of hours. They allow us to keep in touch and quickly discuss problems, but they still have disadvantages. For instance, answering one message after another interrupts you from doing something you were concentrating on.

You all probably have experienced it: you’re doing some long routine task, then you read a message from your colleague, and then have to return to what you were doing. It often looks like meetings are a waste of money for companies. However, this example shows quite the opposite: it’s cheaper and more effective to dedicate time for communicating than to do it randomly throughout the day and get interrupted from a task.

Generally, whether you need work meetings or not depends on many factors, such as:

• the complexity and developmental stage of the business
• the number of changes happening at the moment
• the number of people on your team
• the multiculturalism of your team
  

Logically, if you have higher values on each of these parameters, everyday communication is needed to maintain productivity. This means that your company is rapidly growing. Thus, all the processes should be regularly organized and reorganized, which is simply impossible without communication. This is the case for us: Refocus is a little over a year old with a multicultural team, and we constantly develop our product–changing the existing ones and creating new ones. So, a lot of communication takes place every day.

We don't avoid work meetings but also try to find a golden means. There are three cases when we usually shift communication to a meeting:

1. It is something regular. If you notice that you get interrupted every day by discussing the same matter over and over again, it’s pretty logical to have a brief meeting 1-2 times a week and talk about it there. For example, we’ve noticed recently that we constantly ask each other questions about CSAT or Customer Satisfaction, which happens on various Slack channels. People who monitor it get interrupted from their current tasks and answer questions regularly. So we created a meeting in which we discuss this metric on a weekly basis and, at the same time, a dedicated Slack channel to address anything urgent. Another example is the weekly planning each team has: everyone who has tasks assigned to them should attend and join the discussion–not create extra communication and interrupt the team from working.

2. It requires cross-team communication. The work of some teams requires constant communication with others. For example, another Refocus co-founder recently __drew__attention to regular communication between the sales and marketing departments. Similarly, the product and support teams should regularly interact with community managers.
   
3. You can’t solve an issue after a dozen minutes of messaging. I think this simple rule is crucial for communication within remote teams: it's better to talk together for 15 minutes than chat for an hour, waiting for the responsible team member to answer. Of course, we don’t have any kinds of limitations or restrictions – our employees set it up themselves if that helps them come up with a solution.

How to make a meeting productive

To a large extent, the productivity of your work meetings reflects the productivity of your team in general. As I previously mentioned, we don't have to worry about our employees chatting for hours if they don't need to discuss any issues. We invest a lot in hiring people who we can be sure of. They are hardworking, and their goals are aligned with the business’s.

Also, we make sure that apart from having a growth mindset, our employees are good friends with all kinds of collaborative tools: Notion, Slack, Google Docs, Miro, and various task trackers such as ClickUp or Trello. We don’t have time to educate people on how to use them, but I can't say we ever had a problem with this after the pandemic.

However, some simple rules will surely make it better.

1. Adjust the meeting schedule to the time zone of other participants. If your team is spread all over the world, it's not "courtesy" – it's a necessity without which productive communication is impossible. We certainly have two hours of overlap among the most distant team members, so we adjust meetings to their time zones as needed. Therefore, every team member should include information about their time zones in the calendar just to make it less confusing for others.

2. When inviting people to meetings, provide a list of obligatory and optionalparticipants. The latter are those who have expertise in the topic to be discussed and can deepen the discourse. Nevertheless, the meeting will be fine without them. To create one, think about the cost of the meeting: an hour of a manager costs X$ and you invite 6 different people. Will you eventually earn more than was spent?
   

3. Prepare the agenda for the meeting. It can comprise topics you're planning to cover and the information each participant should prepare. Even opening another ready-to-use document requires a couple of extra minutes, not to mention trying to calculate something that you haven’t yet. In most cases, it's easy to prepare, although, to be honest, we don't follow this rule too strictly: an agenda is good when it's convenient and when you know what exactly to cover.

   
   

4. Keep track of the schedule strictly. It's hard to say how much time you should plan for each meeting: host ten of them, and you will decide for yourself. However, you should optimize the time you have – it is fine to politely remind them, "Everyone, let's return to the topic." And if the time appears to not be enough to cover everything, you can always drop one meeting and negotiate on another. Some collaborative tools have built-in functionality to follow the schedule. For example, Miro allows you to set a timer to discuss particular blocks.

   
   

If you have something to discuss regularly, do so

We're sure that the best way to organize a meeting productively is to dedicate time to it on a regular basis. As I mentioned above, it allows your employees to not get distracted from their tasks and to plan their schedules. The frequency of such meetings depends on the issues to be discussed: in some areas, it's impossible to keep up with changes if you don't discuss them every day, and for others, once a week is just fine.

For example, one of the most important regular meetings we have is called Product Daily. Guess what? We have it for an hour every day! This is a key meeting led by the CPO where the product and marketing teams and C-level executives sync on the product’s critical metrics: revenue indicators, percentage of installment approvals, CR, and so on. If something is not normal, each of them needs to be fixed as soon as possible, so that's why we discuss them every day, which is especially the case for a rapidly developing startup.

As for the meetings that take place once a week on Mondays, we have the boards of each C-level with the founders, where they share their weekly indicators. Of course, we're in touch during the week, but those 30 minutes allow us to dive into the processes they run and debug them. And it is also time-saving: each founder prepares their questions and doesn't have to message and wait for a reply. Just after the board, we have another weekly meeting – Megaboard. There, all the C-level executives and founders gather and discuss the business plan for the week in more detail, making the planning smooth and productive.

And if it’s a recurring meeting, don’t forget to adjust it once in a while. When something is working fine, one may fail to keep updating it, even if changes are needed. While regular meetings usually work perfectly, there is always room for improvement. For example, we have recently changed the Product Daily meeting. While it was under development, more and more people got invited. Some were not needed there anymore but kept attending because they knew that it was indeed essential for business and because they received an invitation. So when we cut the list of participants, it became better for everyone! Furthermore, we decided to hold separate meetings for the two markets we have (the Philippines and Indonesia) to have more time to discuss each of them. What I'm saying is: the changes you may need depend on your business indicators, but you will definitely need to make modifications after some time.

Leave space for something more informal

Informal communication between employees should not be underestimated. Without it, it’s almost impossible to collaborate effectively and feel like a part of a team that is reaching the same goal. In the office, people interact naturally, but even in hybrid mode, managers should invest time in helping their subordinates meet each other. So it’s wise to have meetings dedicated to such communication and not forget about it for those that are strictly work-related. The meeting agenda would not be ruined if you spend the first couple of minutes asking, "Hey, how is it going? Where are you now? Do you like it there?" and so on, but it will make future communication easier and more comfortable for everyone. Also, for the same reason, we try to turn on cameras if we can. That's not a hard and fast rule, but isn't it just more comfortable to interact with someone when you can see their face?

Every two weeks, we have an All Team meeting, which is where we comunicate semi-formally, and every team member attends to share business updates, welcome newcomers, and say thank you to each other out loud. This meeting might look like a waste of money–imagine how much an hour would cost each team member. But it is not. It's crucial to know what is happening in other departments and see the faces of your colleagues, even on Zoom.

Another important work meeting you shouldn’t overlook is the regular one-on-one each employee has with their manager. At Refocus, this is done as an hour-long meeting once a week. This is a safe place for an employee to share the difficulties they have and receive feedback on their work. To make the one-on-one meetings productive, we also follow agendas, but generally, they are a pretty informal way of communicating between two people.

And what about offline meetings?

Even though the vast majority of our team works remotely, we don't believe it's possible to discuss everything online. During a consultation, one experienced tech founder with company’s evaluation of $600-900M told me: you can do something remotely only if you have already organized it offline. I disagree with this statement partly: the complexity of our business and almost fully remote team sometimes requires trying to do something new online. But generally, that's the rule we try to follow – offline mode provides more opportunities to create something from scratch and discuss it.

One of the things we tried but failed to do remotely was strategy sessions that we had four times a year together with the founder and C-level executives. During these meetings, we discussed the company plans and developed the vector of development for the next three months. We tried to do it online, but it didn’t work out: we spent more time than we usually did and were not able to discuss strategy in enough detail. So we decided to move them offline and meet each other in different parts of the world for about a week. Apart from making business decisions easier, these meetings allow the C-level executives to communicate informally, which might lead to better business synergy, which can never be achieved if talking only about work.

Moreover, the same is true for other personnel. We do encourage informal communication online, but we also have offices where our employees can come to co-work. As I mentioned earlier, our team is not obliged to do so, but some of them do because they feel more comfortable working on-site. If everyone who is required to attend the meeting is there, they often discuss matters offline or just have lunch together and chat. But if at least one person is at home – everyone else should go to different places and join the meeting remotely. Otherwise, it would be a mess.

It is all about the system

When your company is developing rapidly, and your goal is to achieve better results every day, it’s simply impossible not to have meetings to discuss your growth. Building a system of regular and extraordinary meetings will save you time: you will spend less on communication and negotiate better.