Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Meeting Hell

Meetings are a big productivity killer that you can control by working together better.  Studies have shown the cost of meetings, you probably spend a week per month in meetings, and you can calculate your own cost of meetings. The issue isn't just where you spend your team's time, but how you spend it. Vinnie Mirchandani, following my post in Forbes on Email Hell, points out the productivity problem isn't just email.

The other big productivity killer in corporations is meetings. I am constantly surprised to see too many of my client employees just go from meeting to meeting - then, of course come back to their desks to handle the deluge of email!

Like email, improving meeting productivity requires more than personal tactics.  Through leadership, the behavior of the group must change.  This distinction is critical in our current climate.  Companies need to make do with less -- and doing so cannot be done through personal productivity gains -- but with efficient and effective coordination and collaboration of teams, the organization as a whole, and how partners and customers intersect.

Changing meetings is difficult because nowhere does company culture manifest itself, if not define itself, than through meetings.  The meeting culture of some companies puts a premium on presentation, or cooperation to consensus, or conflict as creativity.  Research has even shown that most meetings are status contests.  Beyond this theater as a disclaimer, here is some practical advice to make meetings more effective and efficient:

Do I need to be there?

Without a criteria for who should attend meetings, the attendee list tends to grow.  Not only does having more people in the meeting effect the productivity of the meeting, but it keeps people from working on other things.  Put responsibility for this criteria upon the person calling the meeting, as they have the greatest odds of abusing it.

Share notes

At the beginning of every meeting, ensure that someone is taking notes and how they will be shared.  Better yet, have an established practice for how this is done in every meeting.  Sharing notes can help decrease the attendee list for efficiency sake.  How notes are taken can make the group more effective:

• Consider having the note taker project while taking notes.  This clarifies and gains support for what was said and what is agreed to. 
• Take notes in a wiki to make it easy to link to supporting materials, pass editing control to others, share while taking and makes the notes searchable and discoverable alongside other knowledge.
• Don't aim for meeting minutes, encourage summarization, but try to capture as much as possible.  The great thing about meeting notes is that they carry with them the context of an event.  Small things said may mean a lot in the future. For example, someone might contribute an alternative point of view that wasn't part of what might be the summary, but when someone finds it outside the meeting they can contact the person to further explore it.
• Focus on next steps.  Conclude meetings with agreement on what was learned and the action items.

One tendency I have seen is to constrict note sharing for sake of politics.  Sometimes this necessary, but the instinct for control tends to hamper productivity.  For example, if division heads need to meet on an HR issue and craft a message for broader consumption, sometimes the meeting owner controls the notes.  Always share notes with meeting attendees and have a protocol for how they will be shared further.

What's the goal?

A meeting without a clear goal shouldn't exist.  Goals help focus conversation, but also ensure time is being spent towards the right outcome.

The most unproductive outcome of a meeting is having another meeting.  Usually because of unclear goal setting.  Unfortunately, meetings are autopoietic, meaning they self-propagate.  The only time a meeting should lead to another meeting is if that is the up front goal (let's plan the annual sales kickoff, or let's divide the strategic planning we need to accomplish into these three meetings).

What's the agenda?

The structure of an agenda should support accomplish the goal of the meeting.  One challenge is trying to limit agenda items while everyone has their own agendas and need to be heared.  One of the quickest produtivity gains available is to perform agenda setting in a wiki beforehand.  Be sure you bring people's attention to the agenda as it changes.  Link to supporting materials so everyone arrives at the meeting not only understanding the goal, but understands the subject matter behind each agenda item.

Will this ever end?

Always have a firm start time and end time for meetings.  Notice that when meetings have a firm end time, and you get close to it, suddenly the meeting becomes more productive?  Consider how time as a constraint can provide focus for conversation.  Consider trying that hour long meeting in 30 minutes.

Identify Subgroups

Before a meeting, consider if a subgroup of attendees can better discuss and decide or recommend a course of action.  During a meeting recognize when the conversation really is for a subset of attendees, and if time allows, table the conversation until the subgroup can work it out.

Standup Meetings

One of the best practices businessfolk can adapt from agile software development methodologies is the standup meeting.  Have the team meet daily for 5-15 minutes to synch on status.  Sometimes this is done litterally standing up, which gives even the most diligent of soldiers a stake in ending the meeting before they pass out.  Each team member takes a turn updating everyone, perhaps taking clarifying questions, but not using the forum for protracted discussion.

Prep Time

The beauty of the standup meeting is that everyone comes prepared to update others.  However, this preparation doesn't come for free.  You need to allow the team members time to prepare for the meeting. 

One evolution I've witnessed at Socialtext is how they increasingly shared their status updates in the wiki before the standup meeting, and then it became convention for everyone to read the updates before the meeting.  In any meeting format, status updates are better replaced with coordinating conversations, unblocking issues and gaining a shared understanding of priorities.

BAHM: Big Hairy Audacious Meetings

So far, I've provided general considerations for making meetings more productive for groups. But what are some bold things you can try with your team? For the more adventurous teams, here are some Big Hair Audacious Meeting methods to consider:

• Barcamp Your Retreat -- At Socialtext, half of our employees are remote, so our face to face meetings really matter when we have them.  Initially we did like all companies do, lots of time preparing the perfect agenda, with lots to cover.  Once we tried a Barcamp-style open space methodology for the first afternoon.  People liked it so much, we threw away the structured agenda for the week and let it self-organize.  At the end of the week, everyone revelled in the experience, but we also reviewed the original agenda and found we covered every single item.
• Turn it Off or Turn it On -- Companies have gone to the extreme in adapting to having connectivity available during meetings.  Some have banned laptops and blackberries during meetings, which I think completely misses the point.  Doing email in meetings is bad, but the cause is usually a culture of unproductive email and meetings.  Having laptops augment meetings, with wikis, backchannels and the ability to search, is good with the right focus.  But you need to make people conscious of the issue.  Try three things:
  • During specific portions of a meeting, or certain kinds of meetings, the organizer needs to demand all laptops shut for 100% focus on the people in the room.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ask people to bring their laptops and look to augment the meeting with social software and search. Afterwards, ask people how this made your team more productive, or not.
  • Try meetings for a week where you specifically ban everything but pen, paper and people.  Afterwards, ask people how it helped or hurt productivity -- but more importantly talk about if time and effectiveness is being lost because people are not valuing attention.
• Standups -- I used standup meetings as an illustration of how time is best use for status reporting, but do try this format with your team.
• Make Every Meeting a Party -- I always quote Pete Kaminski's insight that "time spent face to face is too valuable for work" to make the point that teams need to socialize.  If you don't afford the time to help your team be unproductive, they will make meetings unproductive.
• Turn Recurring Meetings into Processes -- survey the meeting topics of your organization and you may find recurring meetings that are the result of broken business processes.  Fix the process or lackthereof.
• Get Back to One-on-Ones -- short one-to-one meetings can be incredibly productive.  They even help decrease email volume.  Consider the patterns with your team, and if you can carve out the time for one-on-one meetings by having less group meetings.
• No Meeting Monday -- this is the obvious audacious one.  Consider banning meetings on Monday, not just because it is a good day for people to collect themselves and orient how meetings should be conducted for the rest of the week.  But it will raise the conciousness of meeting cost.  As with email, knowing it is an issue we are all responsible for is half the battle.

In summary, I don't take the extreme position that meetings are wholly unproductive, and the issue isn't the cost of meetings, but how to increase their return by working together better.  In future posts I hope to address how to make meetings more effective and efficient with partners and customers.

Related readings:

• Best Buy's Results Only Work Environment (ROWE)
• Tim Ferriss' Do-Not-Do-List
• 37signals' Meetings are Toxic
• Short case study on meeting augmentation
• Outsourcing memory
• 43 folders on Topless meetings
• Productivity of Far Flung Teams
• The hidden cost of meetings

Leadership and Management of Distributed Collaboration, and the Rise and Fall of the Chief Community Officer

Last week I was on a panel at Office 2.0 discussing "who owns community?"  Organizational Development was just one topic we explored, and ZDnet has a brief video excerpt.  In this post, let me clarify my comments.

Leadership in Distributed Organizations

My CEO Eugene Lee was recently an executive at Adobe and Cisco.  The transition over the past year wasn't just from Bigco to Startup.  Half of Socialtext's employees are distributed across four continents.  Eugene recently observed that "in a distributed organization, leadership matters more than management."

This isn't just about motivating distributed teams.  Distributed teams have higher coordination costs without a clear direction.  This is similar to Eugene Kim's point that "there is no such thing as collaboration without a goal."  An extreme example is viewing Wikipedia as distributed mass collaboration, where the clear mission of what to create and why not only attracts volunteers, but reduces the costs of coordinating them to the point where a phantom authority can work. 

At the scale of a distributed startup, leadership amounts to establishing a focus.  If you attempt to manage at the task level instead of providing a framework for team members to decide if something is within or without the focus of the team, the team isn't moving fast enough.  Management does provide the process discipline and measurements to sustainably keep the smaller decisions in check with focus, but it underperforms in abscence of leadership.  And there is another word for too much management, overhead.

When everyone works in one place, "management by walking around" comes at the cheap.  Walking around four continents is not. As our distributed collaboration tools get better at sharing social context as a byproduct of being productive, new management practices unfold.  I think we are just beginning to discover the practices for managing networked organizations, and one of them is the emphasis of leadership.

Who Should "Own" Community?

On the panel I answered with the always correct answer that "it depends."  But also suggested that ownership of community will trend in two directions.  Social Software has made community a strategic imperative for many organizations.  Recalling when risk management became a strategic imperative in some industries about ten years ago, you saw the rise of the Chief Risk Officer.  While the emergence of a new CxO function is fleeting at best, I was provocative to make a point that we could see the rise of the Chief Community Officer to align and coordinate internal and external communities.

Charlene Li twittered this, prompting a twitterstorm.

But there is a more likely scenario -- where community becomes a function of process ownership.  I don't beleive it will be left to specialist Community Managers who report into Marketing.  Community will become a facet of everyone's job.  Not just external communities for customers and partners and media and investors and developers and more.  Every process in the enterprise has the potential to be redesigned with more transparency and participation through Social Software.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, Process owners will lead communities.  They have the domain expertise within and around the process to drive conversation and collaboration around aligned goals.  However, it will take time to acquire community skills and for the organization to transition. 

360 Degree Process Communities

Let me illustrate this scenario.  Today ownership in corporations of customer communities commonly resides in marketing. This makes sense when you consider "Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view" (Peter Drucker twittered via Tim O'Reilly & John Battelle).  But marketing doesn't own all the more specialized processes that create this view, so Marketing Managers become traffic cops and attempt to interface the whole organization.  Customer communities are more sterile, homogenized and veneer than they will be in the future.  When people seeking support, sales, partner, developer and media conversations intersect primarily with one part of the organization that has its own goals and measurements -- you have an elephant trying to fit through a keyhole and nobody knows who has the key.

Before issuing a call for a COO, consider this evolution.  Support often is the next group to take ownership of its community.  Sometimes there is organizational alignment behind it (the VP of Support also owns Product Quality, or dotted lines with Marketing).  With this more specialized ownership, the VP of Support then manages two communities and possibly a third.  Contact Center employees and customers seeking after-market product support, and potentially tapping across the entire organization to help resolve exceptions. 

This is a 360 degree view of community around a set of processes.  Consider the same for Marketing.  More specialized ownership would have them transition MarCom processes into driving the conversations around those communications.  But also increased focus on internal communities, beginning with their most important customers, sales (we just concludes a webinar series on collaboration between marketing and sales, available for download).  In today's market, where 50% of consumers trust the voice of the rank and file employee over the CEO, the more active Marketing is in internal communities, the more successful external communities become.

Initially, 360 Degree Process Communities will be formed by front office such as marketing, sales, business development, professional services and support.  HR has already begun this evolution within the back office.  And while you may discount it at first thought, don't rule out process communities in back office functions like finance where you least expect it.

Process to Practice

Mike Gotta once made an important distinction clear for me.  That Process is "how work should be done."  And Practice is "how work is actually done."  When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things.  When process doesn't exist, practice fills the void.  While people don't realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community -- an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done.  The problem is that we haven't had the tools to support good practice.  The problem is that we haven't developed the group memory around practice that creates institutional leverage.   In fact, we still design organizations to prevent practice and cultures that hoard knowledge and communities.  With all the focus on Process Execution, its time to instill at least awareness of Practice Execution.

Breaking the Glass Silo

Establishing ties and communication across silos is a goal of many of my customers.  Unfortunately, most companies have information flowing up and command flowing down with only executives coordinating across departments.  Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization, a new HBS working paper by Adam M. Kleinbaum, Toby E. Stuart, and  Michael L. Tushman combs through millions of emails, calendar entries and teleconferences in a large enterprise to reveal some patterns of working across organizational, spatial and geographic boundaries:

• Communication is heavily constrained by formal organizational structure: the vast majority of communication occurs within business unit and functional boundaries, not across them. This points to the importance of drawing the right organizational boundaries.
• Women, mid- to high-level executives, and members of the executive management, sales, and marketing functions are most likely to participate in cross-group communications.
• These individuals provide a bridge for distant groups in a company's social structure.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Open sessions a frequent question was if there were any gender differences to be considered for implementation and adoption.  This research indicates that women are more apt to bridge. 

Some of our better champions are women that work across these boundaries.  And even better, its our job to help them succeed and get promoted.