What makes a weekly work meeting worth your time?

Have a revolving host. Unfortunately these meetings are required else people whinge there is no regular touch point :rolleyes:

Potentially shorten to 15 mins. If your team keep trying to bin it off ask them in a one to one why and what they'd do to make it more engaging.
 
Our meetings are remote or hybrid. before lockdown these meeting didn't happen.


We have a weekly/fortnightly company one thats good just a list short updates and occasionally someone will do a 10 mins "feature" on some business area. We record it, and its available if someone misses it. Probably our most attended meeting.

We have weekly team meeting/chat on which is semi useful, but only because normally the team hate sharing information with each other and is quite dysfunctional but in a chat format, they leak information constantly, because they can't resist showboating. Its also a good opportunity to delegate work you don't want to do because those showboating and/or martyrs love to overload themselves when they have a platform to be seen doing it. So ends up being useful by accident.

We also have a weekly/fortnightly dept meeting which isn't that useful, as most of us have no context for what other teams are talking about. (really needs a published agenda) Teams that don't have a team meeting use this to showboat, and its cringe (and obvious) if someone is trying to talk nothing into something. But you do hear occasionally about dept level information, that normally doesn't filter down to your team.


In general meetings need an agenda and an objective. Also need to be recorded (if only in summary) so they can be referenced. Action points and schedule for the next meeting should be agreed.
 
ChroniC said:
Why can't this be done in a face to face Video chat / Teams / Zoom meeting though.
What benefit is there from communicating the same thing to myself or management that required a 30min drive, getting up earlier. Paying for lunch and parking etc.

My position could be entirely different but unless I physically need to be teaching someone with physical objects, then I think it can be done online..

Hate to put it to you but most people (imo of course) couldn't give a rats ass about their fellow employees. Just get the work done as efficiently and as cheaply as possible.
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Sorry maybe I didn’t make it clear but it is being done via video chat. My time are based in 8 different countries so it would be impossible to do it face to face regularly :P

To quote your last point though, we’re culturally VERY different to every other company I’ve worked at - people want to interact with others, they just want it to be worth their time is all.
 
MrRockliffe said:
Sorry maybe I didn’t make it clear but it is being done via video chat. My time are based in 8 different countries so it would be impossible to do it face to face regularly :p

To quote your last point though, we’re culturally VERY different to every other company I’ve worked at - people want to interact with others, they just want it to be worth their time is all.
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My apologies, re-reading the OP I jumped to a large conclusion. I have no problem with several weekly video meetings. We talk about what we're working on etc.
 
It's funny, two days ago I finished the (audio)book 'Death By Meeting' which is kind of all about exactly this. If you're a fast reader, might be worth reading. (Or listening too, it was about 5 hours)

ChroniC said:
Hate to put it to you but most people (imo of course) couldn't give a rats ass about their fellow employees. Just get the work done as efficiently and as cheaply as possible.
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Thankfully I've not worked in this kind of place. I've always made it a priority to bring a team together. It's much harder working remotely now, but I'm making progress with it. I (now) work in the Scrum framework like @Dup so the meetings are quite well defined with a clear purpose and length and on the whole accomplish what is needed.
 
Weekly meetings are fine if they make the rest of the week genuinely more efficient, for me that means the chair of it has to be good.

Ours can be as long as an hour, but we're typically discussing complex cases, which otherwise would have been done in several meetings spread throughout the week, at least this way it's one and done most of the time.
 
I really hate meetings which are just reading off the printout or slides - nothing added, no insight or attempt to engage the team on points, etc.

Sadly necessary as some people refuse to take any interest in the information/updates of their own volition unless forced to.
 
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