How do efficient teams and meeting culture belong together?

And suddenly the 80s pop up!

The somewhat older readers will remember the Neue Deutsche Welle. And probably also the Ina Deter Band: New men are needed! (Neue Männer braucht das Land!)

In the last years, and also in the course of the pandemic, I, Frank, remembered it. And in the style of this song it now becomes:

We write it on every office wall, a new meeting culture is needed by the country! A radical new meeting culture is needed!

Now I see this strongly from the point of view of our main market Brazil, where we mainly work for clients from Brazil, North America and Europe in project missions. But I have a sneaking hunch that it is also 1:1 transferable to most other markets and especially when it comes to the transformation towards digital business models.

Previous story

During the pandemic period, we at iManagementBrazil did a whole lot of evaluations of our projects worked on since 2005. The goal: to redefine and refocus our company.

By evaluating the monthly activity reports, we could clearly see that the percentage of videoconferences and physical meetings was rapidly increasing since the year 2015. Also, since 2016, we have been regularly involved in project missions with Brazilian startups. So we asked around at the incubation center what the situation was like there. Surprise, seat times in physical meetings and video conferences are exploding here as well.

Of course, we have completely eliminated the 2020 and 2021 pandemic with a total of 19 months.

Result

We, our clients' employees, and employees of companies we know tend to spend between 3.5 and 4 days per month in meetings and video conferences (strategy meetings, coordination meetings, conference calls, video calls). This corresponds to about 20% of the effective working time per month. That's neutral information for now - nothing more!

As I said, this eliminated the pandemic period where the time employees spent in meetings in the so-called home office did not necessarily improve. If anything, more digital commitments had been added: be it online coffee with a colleague or virtual family get-togethers.

At the same time, video conferences and hybrid meetings are still perceived as significantly more strenuous than "real" meetings. Without having a verified numerical basis, however, we can state that probably a total of 25 percent of women and 20 percent of men feel "very" to "extremely" exhausted after video calls. This feeling of exhaustion after a day of numerous consecutive online meetings is, after all, what we called "Zoom fatigue" around the globe in 2020/21.

New project reality

As a result of the outstandingly high vaccination rate in Brazil, led by São Paulo with >94%, relaxations were quickly introduced here from Q3 2021. Now we wanted to adjust our observations with a view to the meeting culture in our projects. Or rather, look for a way to make things more efficient.

It's easy to set your mind to it. But how to implement it? Is there a criteria? The way we approached it in the new projects was to create criteria, observe and see if it could be efficient. So there was just one single criterion:

cancel half of all meetings, cancel them, don't put them on the calendar at all.

Assumption: we scheduled the meeting wrong!

From the perceived observations of more than 120 projects in more than 17 years of iManagementBrazil, in meetings with our clients' employees, business visitors from the parent companies, suppliers as well as clients' customers, we filtered out for us a basic problem of the general meeting culture:

Most meetings are mostly just a rehash of things we all actually already knew. In the case of videoconferencing, there is an additional strange factor: videoconference participants often drag out meetings in order to meet the allotted meeting time. This is strikingly true for videoconferences with parent companies from the German-speaking part of Europe.

The collaboration tool

To achieve an efficiency effect we had to change the workflow in the new project missions. So if it should be true that a lot of meetings are just a rehash of long known things, this coordination should be replaced by asynchronous updates and tasks. And this is where collaboration tools come into their own.

Of course, meetings won't be completely eliminated - that would be lunatic to think it's possible. It would also lead to massive inefficiency.

Insight: See video and collaboration tools as two tools in the same toolbox.

How to do it? Tactics of reduction

1. Inventory of all meetings

So, as interim and project managers on a mission with our clients, we always collect all fixed meetings to have an overview. After that, we ad-hoc assess those meetings that only serve a status update. These meetings can then be removed from the list and canceled. They are largely replaced by the use of collaboration tools. This also applies in the relationship with parent companies abroad. We vigorously advise our clients to actively use collaboration tools in their projects and to implement them without fail.

Realization: very quickly it was clear that there was no reason to have multiple 30-minute check-in and follow-up meetings every week when simple written updates could be done through collaboration tools.

2. Radically reduce meeting time

We looked at how long meetings were historically held on specific content, especially routines. Then our single criterion was again applied: 50% reduction.

So a standard weekly meeting of 60 minutes became a meeting of only 30 minutes. In quite a few cases, after a few weeks, we even took a provocative approach and reduced these 30 minutes again. Now it was only 15 minutes.

Realization: The employees in the project, and we ourselves, were surprised how easy it was and how little these meetings were missed.

3. Sharing information differently

Of course, it must be ensured that all important information from the now often omitted meetings still reaches all employees. And this is where the combination of video calls and collaboration tools comes into play.

From our experience so far, we cannot derive any generally valid rules. This has to be adjusted individually from project to project. But you should definitely put the video and collaboration tool in the same toolbox.

It must be clear to everyone who is working on which task. However, this does not require coordination meetings. Project managers and line managers in the project mission must therefore assign topics and tasks via a digital collaboration tool at the beginning of each new week and check the status. It must be ensured that team members can view their tasks there and note their progress.

Realization: It became obsolete for the entire team to regularly check in on each other's work in virtual calls or physical meetings.

4. Be sure to reserve time only for face-to-face meetings

Not all tasks work without video conferencing or physical meetings. Group discussions, emphasis on discussion, brainstorming sessions or one-on-one meetings require a meeting - whether virtual or in person. Time must still be blocked in the schedule for these important meetings.

Where is the journey headed?

We can't say. We are in a laboratory ourselves with these measures. I also don't see any company far and wide holding the magic key or the wand of Harry Potter. But one thing is clear: by changing the meeting culture, you can significantly increase efficiency and reduce costs. Experience to date from a good year of new meeting culture in various projects clearly shows that at least half of all meetings can be eliminated without replacement.

And therefore it is still true: We write it on every office wall, a new meeting culture is needed in the country!