Reducing Meeting Redundancy
Design Process | Leadership | Cross Functional Teams | Increased Efficiency | Relationship Development
The business:
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As we continue to work remotely many team members find themselves in meetings they have never been in before. Where this is often said to be “for collaboration” it is more often from a sense of fear, that someone will be “left out.” Instead of rescheduling a meeting when we realize a key stakeholder wasn’t invited, we tend to have a second meeting to catch them up. Leaving the majority of team members in redundant meetings day after day.
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The challenge:
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User Experience Teams consider themselves thought leaders, improving business goals with technology. They constantly refine processes, and work to collaborate as effectively as possible. Even with 10+ years of experience creating under their belt, the organization I was in was constantly struggling to “do the work.” Inundated with collaboration meetings, team members spent more time talking about the work than actually doing it. As a leader in Product Experience I knew I had to adjust this “talking about the work” mentality not only for myself, but for my team.
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The approach:
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To ensure I wasn’t up against my own confirmation bias, I first asked my team to send me the average number of hours they spent in meetings every day. Once I had confirmed the number of meetings surpassed the number of individual focus hours I knew this was an issue, I had to circulate. Working with the lead of the design (UI) team and a few business leaders we came to an agreement to increase our efficiency in meetings. We would have a clear agenda for every meeting and unanimously agreed to stop having “meetings about meetings.” Instead of meeting with the entire cross-functional squad every day, we would set a new cadence of meeting with our individual areas of expertise (development, UI, analytics, operations) twice a week in place of the larger squad.
Additionally, I led the craft leads to create process flow charts for their individual crafts. These flow charts considered how each craft worked, at what point they needed assistance from the cross-functional team, and how to “raise your hand” when you’re blocked. |
The results:
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After implementing the changes, we immediately began to see an increase in trust, more people were in slack huddles throughout the day, and meetings were more productive, not having said the same thing three times to three similar groups of people. Three months later I asked my team to send me the average number of hours they spent in meetings. Though the amount of collaboration had gone up, the number of meetings with five or more people had decreased by 20%.
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