How eliminating classic meetings saved our team 200 hours per week
By: Mats Bauer
Tags: Meetings, Startup, Efficiency, Productivity

In the past years, I moved from one of the world's biggest companies to a small startup. And the differences between the two working worlds are incredible! The entire attitude to work and getting work done is a complete 360. In most prominent companies, ducking when work comes flying is normal. Sitting at your desk for three hours without anything to do before going home is normal. And scheduling long and bloated meetings with as many people as are available is even desired and makes everyone involved feel important. This attitude is entirely different in smaller companies. You most likely enjoy your work and thus go looking for it. When you have nothing to do, which is unusual, you go home and don’t waste your time just sitting around. And scheduling meetings is evil!

The evilness of meetings

Meetings can be a good idea if you try to catch someone who is busy and only has small timeslots available. But for most of us working rabbits, meetings are just a pain. Whenever my calendar flashed up, I was either knee-deep in solving a problem or in discussion with someone. Meetings killed both my productivity/flow and my creativity and exchange.

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Measuring the evilness

At my previous company, we noticed that we had many meetings and decided to measure the actual weekly overhead one day. We were 20 developers, including manager and leads. A regular meeting mostly included up to 8 people, and we had 4 hours of all-hand calls per week, including daily’s, sprint planning, and retroes. Summing up all of the meeting times that were non-essential to scrum, we came to an overhead of 200 hours per week! Assuming an average developer’s hourly rate of $50, the overhead cost close to $500.000 per year!

Introducing Meeting 2.0

To reduce this astonishingly high overhead, we decided on a new concept for creating and using meetings. We had a look at the types of meetings we held, and most of them were technical questions or reviews, pair programming sessions, or working on problems together. We noticed that for most problems, only one person knew the answer. But what did we do? We created a one-hour session with six people, of whom only two people participated properly. 4 hours of unnecessary overhead! We ended those evil meetings. They became forbidden! Only leads could create events in the calendars.

So how did we solve our problem or question? In the group chat, we asked who could help and called the first person who responded. If, during the call, you noticed that another person could help, ask him if he is available to join. Once the problem is solved, the event is ended. There are no time limits and no time arrangements. No reasons for people to artificially bloat the meeting, just to fill the entire scheduled hour.

Besides the time saved, we noticed a huge increase in efficiency and happiness, as no (maybe irrelevant) events pulled developers out of their working sessions or deep thoughts.

Using our meeting 2.0, people were learning to speak up in meetings and say: “Look guys, I think I am not of any help here; I will leave the meeting. Let me know if I should join back in later”.

That attitude became normal and felt great! Using a predefined meeting, nobody would ever dare to leave it! Especially if there were ten people in it. You didn’t want to appear snob or disinterested. So you muted yourself, laid back and waited for it to finish.

It’s your turn now to eliminate the overhead and move to meeting 2.0!