A meeting cadence is how often a meeting is held. In an increasingly distributed workforce where a face-to-face meeting is sometimes the only interactions you’ll have with your team, these are often overscheduled in the hopes that these “in person” meetings will be beneficial to building relationships and team morale
The right meeting cadence
Decide which meetings needs to be asynchronous (delayed responses) and which ones need to be in-person, synchronous meetings
- Allow enough freedom for everyone to work autonomously
- Example: One-on-One meetings, All Hands meetings, Daily standup meetings, Leadership Teams meetings
Do we run out of items to discuss in these types of meetings?
If not, consider consolidating those into a weekly check-in and moving those daily updates to be asynchronous updates rather than in-person ones.
- Friday offers a wide range of meeting templates to help you get started.
Fewer Meetings = Better Meetings
15% of an organization’s time is spent in meetings
- Move that 15% towards actionable tasks that can increase revenue in your business
- 73% of people admit to multitasking during meetings, so let your employees spend more time doing their work
If At First You Don’t Succeed, Try a New Meeting Cadence
Your team size and company culture will have a lot to do with how you want to communicate internally as a team.
- For small teams, daily check-ins can be beneficial, but for larger companies, doing this in-person can be a huge disruption to their workday.
Is this a high-priority or urgent task?
Only team leaders will know what these projects are and be able to determine how frequent these check-ins need to be.
- However, from our experience, the more urgent the task the more often you might be required to meet.
How to Improve Your Meetings with Friday
Fewer and better meetings are key to a productive work week and a happier team
- Using Friday, you can eliminate low-priority meetings, free up your team’s calendars, and stay connected without having to be in constant communication
- Features include a planner, power-ups, and icebreaker questions
Do these types of meetings regularly run over the allotted time?
Meetings that frequently feel like they get cut short might be a reason to schedule those meetings to be more frequent rather than longer.
Change Your Cadence: Asynchronous vs Synchronous Meetings
Information seeking meetings can fall into any of the following categories: A kickoff meeting for a new project, A project team meeting to discuss next steps, A management meeting to check in on how teams are running
- For information giving meetings, those might be: A project update, A company’s annual report, A one-on-one with a direct report
What is the goal of this meeting?
Is this meeting’s goal to offer up new information to key players or is it simply for people to update the team
- How often a meeting is scheduled will determine how often it will be asked agains the same cadence
Can this meeting happen asynchronously?
As a remote or distributed team, you have flexibility and you do not have to fall back on the defaults of the past.
- Think about ways you can operate differently because the work situation has drastically changed
- For meetings largely motivated by updates, setting aside time for an in-person check in is unnecessary.
Do’s and Don’ts for your meetings
Create an agenda
- Invite only key players to a meeting
- Don’t go over the allocated meeting time
- Make sure everyone knows what will be covered in advance so they can attend better prepared
- Leave room for questions at the end
