Rules to Better Meetings

Meetings are awesome to brainstorm ideas and get in-sync. For some topics they are way more effective than typing on a group chat. There are a few benefits that meetings have, which make them useful to have (for the appropriate topics/reasons).

Bloating a meeting with unnecessary numbers is the #1 way that a meeting can be doomed... before it starts. Any meeting with more than 10 people is destined to have people attend but who do not participate or contribute. Aim to keep it to 6 or fewer.

Teams Meeting chats are only visible to people who were invited to the meeting. If someone joins late or isn’t invited, they won’t see the previous conversation.

If others need to be part of the discussion or you want to continue the conversation after the meeting ends, create a group chat instead.

Meetings don't have to be a drag. When they're done right, they actually help teams move faster and stay on the same page. Let's break down how to keep meetings focused, useful, and worth showing up for.

Scheduling meetings can often feel like a necessary chore, especially when they lack a clear purpose or agenda. Calls or video meetings, without any clear agenda or purpose, are where your joy and energy go to die.

Here’s how to ensure your meetings are effective and worthwhile. Before a meeting, to give it the best chance of success, you should make sure you have done the following:

Waiting for participants to join a meeting can be awkward and make people feel disengaged. It's crucial for the meeting leader to maintain a positive and energetic atmosphere during this time to set the tone for the rest of the meeting.

Anchoring is a cognitive bias where an initial piece of information (the "anchor") heavily influences subsequent judgments and decisions. This bias can infiltrate various aspects of our lives, including workplace interactions and negotiations. Recognizing how anchoring works is crucial to making informed and unbiased decisions. Custom software is difficult to estimate and using an anchor too early or without the necessary rigour can create issues.

Clients often have an implicit budget or value anchor in their minds when discussing projects. This anchor can be based on a budget set by their business or a perceived value. If you don't uncover this anchor early, it can lead to misaligned expectations and project dissatisfaction.

Any good meeting has a clear goal, and an agenda that breaks that goal up into items that are “For information,” “For discussion,” or “For decision”.

The primary objective of most meetings should be to establish clear next steps. These steps should be broken down into action items and assigned to the responsible individuals, with all other attendees CC’d.

It's recommended to designate a scribe who drafts action points during the meeting and assigns them directly to those responsible for completing the tasks. The scribe should also document any decision-making process by writing down each person's arguments. After writing down everyone’s comments on the options, the notes can be reviewed as a group to better inform what the best course of action might be. If the scribe hasn't been designated at the start, simply ask: "Who will be the scribe?"

Common action items may include:

As businesses become larger and more complex, it's harder for the decision makers to keep up to date with every product change or be in every meeting. Responsibilities for decision making cannot be delegated but gathering the information to make an informed decision can.

One common tactic is to have a delegate attend the meeting on their behalf and then loop them in at the end, bringing them up to date with an executive summary.

Here are some tips to doing this effectively:

Keeping to your meeting’s timebox shows that you respect your attendees, and allows for you and them to be efficient and able to plan their days effectively. One meeting going over by 30 minutes can have knock on effects for the rest of the day, and a culture of this will create that feeling of “meeting dread” that can be so common.

Always start your meetings on time. Especially for meetings that are regular, as it will teach your attendees that they need to be there from the start, and they will not be waited for.

Make sure that you cover as much of the agenda as possible within the timebox, and keep other topics to a minimum.

When you identify topics that do need to be hashed out, but are off topic and don't need to be covered in this meeting, keep track of them in a “Parking Lot”.

E.g. During the meeting you can call out “Off topic. I think that topic should be saved for the “Parking Lot”. Who is interested in joining that?”

It can be difficult to get everybody into a meeting, especially these days when many meetings are online. It is important that time is not wasted in these situations, so it's good to be proactive and have a plan for when the decision maker is busy.

Microsoft Teams makes it super easy to record meetings, whenever you are presenting something important or making impactful decisions, the meeting scribe should 'hit record'.

Before recording, let the attendees know that the meeting will be recorded (Teams has a popup that does this automatically).

Why record meetings?

• Document decisions - If design decisions are made in a meeting, having a record means you can go back and check what was said.
• Easy to Share - You can send YouTube links to clients or distribute internally
• Training Material - Use the recordings for onboarding or as case studies
• Post-Meeting Analysis - Review to make your next meeting even better
• Remote Inclusion - Helps remote or absent team members stay in the loop (Its always better if they can attend)

Storing recordings

When you record meetings in Teams, they are stored in Microsoft Stream. Microsoft Stream will delete recordings, so ensure the meeting scribe downloads the recording and uploads it to YouTube.

After recording find the link to the recording in the meeting chat

1. Click the 'Copy to' button and move the file to a relevant Team's channel

Figure: Click 'Copy to'

1. Move the recording to a relevant Team's channel

Figure: Move recording to a better

1. If you are going to share the video, upload it to YouTube and send the link

Manually typing out meeting notes is slow, error-prone, and distracting. While you’re typing, you’re likely missing parts of the discussion and contributing less. Worse, you might spend time afterward cleaning up notes instead of acting on them.

In fact, employees estimate that 37% of their biggest cost is wasted time in meetings, and context-switching after interruptions takes an average of 9 minutes to recover from. Manual notetaking multiplies both problems.

Have you ever been in a meeting and after 30 minutes, you realize you haven’t said a word? As time passes, the pressure builds, and you become more stressed about speaking up. The longer you wait, the harder it feels to contribute. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many professionals, especially juniors, struggle with speaking up in meetings, and this hesitation can make their expertise go unnoticed.

Here are seven actionable ways to confidently speak up more in meetings:

When meetings are recorded or shared with colleagues across different offices, using a language other than English creates a barrier for team members who can't understand it. This prevents important information from being accessible to all stakeholders, especially those in the main offices who need to review or understand the meeting content.