Monday Morning Meetings - What format do you use?

Question

We're trying to improve the format of our Monday morning meetings (M3). The meeting is among all members of our company (20 persons) including developers, designers, administrative and the company's president.

It starts with a round-table of 1 word check-in (social) and then transitions into business aspects.

We tried a project-focused format where team-leads work off of a project list stating the updates and outstanding issues, but the team members felt disconnected. Then, we tried a stand-up-like format (previous week, this week, roadblocks), but team-leads felt they didn't get a good handle on all the projects.

Any suggestions on M3 formats?

And No. It can't be cancelled :)

Answer 1

you've already eliminated the most productive option, which is to cancel it

meetings are only useful for high-bandwidth communication; this does not sound like one

so if this kind of should-be-in-an-email status plinking is truly unavoidable, the alternative is to shift into two very short stand-up meetings: each team meets for no more than one minute per team member, and then the team leads meet with the execs for a similar amount of time. That way at least the entire team's time won't be wasted

mondays are hard enough to face without kick-starting the week with an energy-draining, obviously pointless meeting ;-)

Answer 2

First, does everyone need to be there? If not, that might make the meeting more focused.

We do daily stand-ups on my team, but that's not the only way we communicate information. We use a Big Visible Wall (also known as an information radiator) which shows the current stories that are in progress, ready for testing or ready for business verification. We also sync that to a tool called ProjectCards which gives both the iteration-level view, and a higher-level theme view of where everything stands.

I think the issue is that you are trying to use that meeting as your primary means of communication. I would start by introducing other means of communication to augment the meeting so that it becomes a checkpoint to what everyone should already know.

Answer 3

My company doesn't do anything like this. I'm not sure if we should but still I have some thoughts on it.

Similar to Cory, my idea is to break down the meeting. The idea would be to do a trickle up. So have developers, designers, etc report status to their managers in one time frame (say 9am); then those managers report to their manager (at 10am), and etc. until the president has been informed of status on the different projects.

I think this would focus the information to the target audience, while still being enough information. Finally (in theory) it would save time for each level because each level would only hear information related to their project or responsibilities.

Best Regards,
Frank

Answer 4

I always found that forcing everyone to stand did wonders for keeping folks focused and the length of meetings as short as possible.

Answer 5

Do team based meetings instead. 20 people is way too large of a meeting. We have 5 people. We all sit with in 10 meters of each other. We keep it informal and short. Most of the time we don't even both to roll our chairs out from our cubicals, we just stand in the center. If we need to communicate with people out side the team, the team leader does it or we invite the person, usually by yelling across the room, to our informal meeting.

We only using a meeting room if we have a customer sitting in on the meeting. We do want to appear to be professional.

Answer 6

Hold it in the afternoon, starting at 5:15. Everyone's very focussed on only discussing essential information then.

Answer 7

It sounds like you might be experiencing your company's first growth pains. Am I right in guessing that your company grew quite recently from very small to it's current size?

A weekly meeting with everyone in the company sounds like it's an excellent idea when the company is four or five people. Everybody keeps in touch, they get to know what each other are doing, you feel connected, it's great - team building and useful communication in one!

However as your company gets bigger, the value of this meeting declines. The more people there are the less people get to talk, so the less they feel connected. And more of the meeting starts to become irrelevant to more of the people, like when the marketing guys start discussing their strategy for the upcoming launch. The developers start to shuffle their feet and think about that algorithm they are working on.

So the point is, break the meeting up. Maybe have the team leads (or heads of department) meet once a week, and have each of them meet with their teams afterward, to pass on any company-wide information. You can do company-wide meetings less frequently, when you've got something special to say and make sure there's food so nobody feels like its wasted time. Don't worry - it's part of growth and change. Joel wrote a whole article about it recently, about how they've suddenly realised that Fog Creek needs middle managers.

Who knows, if you keep growing, maybe you'll eventually need two layers of management.

Answer 8

Well, appreciating your feedback. I'll answer few questions that were raised in the discussions:

Does everyone need to be there?

Yes, it's more a company policy. It's not a progress/production meeting in the pure sense, but rather a business meeting.

Am I right in guessing that your company grew quite recently from very small to it's current size?

The company is not growing, and has been there for quite a few years. The meeting has always been held (with a few variations in the format).

I personally think this type of meetings is good in getting all members together (business, tech, design), be it for the social aspect, for a company-wide direction, or for cross-domain knowledge. Do I think it's a waste of time? I think it depends (partly on the level of contribution), that's why I'm looking for a good format that would make everyone benefit and contribute.

Answer 9

We do daily status meetings. They start at 9:00. Those who arrive at 9:01:00 or later pay a $1 fine. Everyone follows the format, "yesterday, I <foo>. Today I will <bar>. My impediments are <baz>. The meeting is last no longer than 15 minutes. It is my job at the meeting to intercept rat's nest conversations that aren't important and reroute them.

Edit: the $1 goes into a Yoda bank and is used to fund general entertainment items for the office.

Answer 10

There are three things wrong with this approach:

1. Monday
2. Morning
3. Meetings

Answer 11

I am not sure why you think this is a good idea (from your post: "I personally think this type of meetings is good in getting all members together (business, tech, design), be it for the social aspect, for a company-wide direction, or for cross-domain knowledge.")

Why do they all need to get together? Why monday morning? Why not have a lunchtime meeting that is already non-productive and if the company feels it is important to the business then maybe it will also feel it important enough to either buy lunches or snacks and make better use of people's time?

Again, in my experience I found these to be wastes of time and the people who usually get up and speak or run the meetings have an ego thing or can't figure out better ways to achieve the results they want.

Answer 12

Team leads focus should not be on getting a handle on projects in a weekly meeting. That's where the team's daily stand-up is for. What information needs a week granularity?

Answer 13

My suggestion is to have a pair of Monday morning meetings where the following is done:

1) First Meeting - Team leads and management. This is where the previous week's achievements are reviewed, current work is assessed and is basically a meeting so the right hand knows what the left is doing sort of thing. This can be viewed as one part brain dump and one part strategic planning based on the dump.

2) Second meeting - Everyone in the company. This is where highlights of the previous meeting are mentioned again but with a different viewpoint: Rather than inform management of what is going on, the results are mentioned, e.g. is there a "Way to go team!" mention or a "This has come up to radically change what we are doing" sort of thing. This should finish with a bit of a Q & A if anyone in the company has a question that they think should be heard by the whole company, e.g. a change in vacation policy or question about Christmas vacations.

The main idea of doing the two meetings is that the first one lets management prepare for the second one so that ramblings and other inefficiencies can be dealt with in advance. This does have the downside of the appearance that management is censoring what team leads say which does have some truth to it, e.g. if a team is doing something that should be kept extremely confidential than some information in the second meeting is a summary of the previous meeting.

Personally, I've always liked to know what is going on in the company: The good, the bad and the ugly. Make me feel like I'm a part of something bigger as well as let me know where spending my energies will be more rewarded than others. If there isn't anything big to announce that should be fine, sometimes nothing big happens in a week.

Answer 14

We only have a small team, and use a whiteboard headed up "The List". If there are things on the list, we get together on Monday afternoon (Monday mornings are no good) for 15-20 minutes and discuss them, otherwise we just skip the meeting.

Answer 15

You need to keep having these meetings until you work out why your firm isn't growing :)

So there is 20 people at this meeting and let's give the people a charge-out rate, say $250/hour. Each meeting is then costing your firm $5,000 which, over a year, is around $250,000 and over four years is a million dollars. Is this meeting the best investment for those resources?

Putting it another way, cancelling this meeting would be the equivalent of putting on a part-time staff member at 50% workload for free giving an immediate 2.5% increase in productivity.

Okay, okay, so you can't cancel it. In that case I would only insist that direct reports of the meeting organiser must attend and report their team's progress. Make it optional for other attendees and see what sort of attrition you get. The team leads report up about their projects and get the feedback from other areas to communicate to their team at the next daily team meeting. Maybe also make it once every two weeks rather than weekly.

For the social aspect, start having Friday night drinks.