meetings, efficiency, productivity
By: Aaron Burdick
Tags: Meetings, Engineering Management, Engineering

Zeals Frontend Engineering Team :)

(I’m the guy in the middle)

Introduction

Hi, I’m Aaron, a frontend engineer at Zeals.

I love having new people come on our team. It always feel like an objective pair of fresh eyes that can help us pinpoint problems, not only from a coding perspective, but our overall processes as a team. Recently, one of our new members, Or, mentioned that we have way too many meetings and I agreed but almost sort of sheepishly. “Well, yeah we have a lot of meetings. We’re all remote working now!”, I thought because the team had switched over to remote working recently at the time. I had just taken the increase in meetings to be just part of the process. But, since I had never actually measured the amount meetings, I thought “you know, he’s probably right, It certainly FEELS like he’s right!”.

After all, too many meetings can really hurt engineer productivity. Engineers and creatives need that “focus time”. Long unbroken spells of focusing on a programming problem or just the right design. It takes you a while to get into a task, but once you’re there you’re making real progress. Was my friend Or right? Are we drowning in meetings? And was this hurting our team? I took his criticism as a chance to analyze and verify.

Meeting Analysis

We’re we spending too much time in meetings? To be honest, I didn’t know what “too much” would be, but my initial guess was that managers could expect to spend around half of their day in meetings, while engineers, on average, would ideally spend around 25% or less of their time in meetings. So, next I had to see how our team stacked-up.

We keep all of our meetings in Google Calendar, so I opened up a spreadsheet and just started counting up each frontend team member’s hours in meetings over a two-week period, with each day being a data point of sorts. I tried to track two pieces of data for each engineer for every day: how many hours total were spent in meetings, and the longest amount of time spent with no meetings (focus-time). After a few crude spreadsheet formulas, I had my numbers, and they weren’t good: all frontend team members spend 42.14% of their time in meetings, with each day having around 2.85 hours of unbroken focus time.

I winced. But, it was reality nonetheless and an opportunity to do better.

Reducing Meetings in the Following Weeks

After sharing our findings in the weekly engineer meeting, I got pretty positive responses to the idea of reducing meetings. So it gave me the courage to just start trying to tighten things up.

We took polls of engineers seeing which meetings we could eliminate, plus I took some liberties to just eliminate meetings that I was holding that, honestly were probably not doing any good. In addition, we determined that “focus time” was something we valued, so we agreed as a team to try to concentrate our meetings into core-time to free up mornings and evenings for focus.

We shifted things around and deleted meetings here and there (mostly weekly meetings that weren’t serving our needs anymore). And honestly, I could feel some of the weight being lifted in the following week! I got responses from engineers saying they felt similar. In order to verify that things had calmed down a bit, I again fired up the spreadsheet and tallied up the results.

Time spent in meetings was reduced on average from 42.13% to 25.13%. Also, the number of unbroken hours of non-meeting time rose from 2.85 hours to 3.745 hours.

Looking Towards the Future

Looking back, I should have done more research on the topic before making decisions. “Concentration Time” is not a new concept, many people refer to it as “Maker Time vs. Manager Time”. And after doing a bit of searching around, there are tools that help teams maximize engineer productivity like okayhq.com.

But at the very least, from here on out we will periodically continue to measure and verify this when people feel bogged down.

We will try to try to concentrate meetings into blocks

Try to remove useless meetings

Have repeating meetings less frequently

Thanks for reading!

Edit (2012/12/19):

Cleaned up various spelling mistakes and rephrased some hard to read sentences.