⚔️🍤 Meet-less Monday: Challenge #3

[#1]

Howdy Community members! 

Happy meet-less Monday 😊.

As you may know, we recently launched a badge to inspire Community members to reduce the number of meetings on their calendar in favor of collaboration in Confluence. 

This week, we want to help you embrace collaborative meetings to avoid pointless calls. More efficient calls aren’t just great for productivity’s sake; they’re also better for your bottom line. According to HBR, a single hour-long meeting with five people who earn $60,000 each costs the company $210. Our study shows people spend an average of per month in unproductive meetings. At a $60,000 salary, that’s $1,302 per month per person — all for pointless calls.

SO, this week's challenge is all about sharing tips for avoiding these pointless, costly meetings! Read this guide on how to embrace collaborative meetings and answer one of the prompts below to win the meet-less badge:

• Pitch 15 min meetings (or even 25 minute meetings) to your team and let us know how it goes! Have you adopted this practice?
• Try canceling a meeting in favor of sending around a Confluence page. How'd that go? 
• Start adding agendas to all of your meetings to encourage people to actually participate ... (Comment with a screenshot of one of your new agendas)!

  • Every agenda should include:

    • The goal of the meeting
    • A concise meeting topic
    • The length of the meeting
    • Relevant background information and resources for context
• Tell us any other tale or tip about "good" meetings you had (or didn't have) this week

Hoping you meet-less this week! 

[Linda Milne_Togetha Group_]

I haven't managed to have a 15min meeting yet. But yesterday, a client scheduled a meeting for 1hr, that I managed to keep to 30mins. Pretty happy with that!

😁👍

[WW]

I recommended a couple of years ago that our team have "Focus Fridays" where there were no meetings in the afternoon every Friday.  Since a lot of people take off on Fridays anyhow, it wasn't too hard to implement.

Everyone just blocked off that time on their calendars to use to focus on getting things done that meetings had been interrupting.

The effort was voluntary to do for yourself, but people were asked to respect others' choices.  The more extroverted people on the team still liked to meet with other extroverts.

[Laura Holton _Valiantys_]

Thanks for this challenge @Bridget 😃

In honour of this I wrote a short article on my experience of taking on this challenge and how we did - this is by no means a requirement for anyone to actually read it but just in case you can check it out here: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Off-topic-articles/Meet-less-May-Taking-on-Challenge-No-3-%EF%B8%8F/ba-p/1698732#M1224

[Pedro Silva]

I love the challenge @Bridget 

[Tereza Červinková]

We usually have 2 days in a week without meetings (not always followed).

I had one meeting per week, perfect, but recently things gone mad!

2hour meetings to teach colleagues how to work in Confluence and Jira thought were my top. But no.

Last week I called a short meeting to agree on my project which would help us exchange the Excel table for Jira & Confluence. It was done. Exactly as planned, with additional apps edited.

Not only was I told that the project outcome will be used for different issues, meaning that few-months-time project is scrapped and will need to be started over.

Also was I told that we need to make rules in creating content in Jira. This means that all the great features and possibilities Atlassian gives us will be tightened to the basics. Not for money, not for employees. Just to give it rules.

Now I wish I followed the meetless May!

[Mechee]

A while back, I suggested that we enable Outlook's built in feature which automatically has hour meetings end 10 min early and 30 min meetings end 5 min early but only a few adopters followed suit. But recently, a meeting invite from the CEO was scheduled using this setting. Now, it's common practice for everyone to turn this on.

[Bridget]

@Tereza Červinková maybe next month!! 😂

[Suvradip Paul]

@Bridget  - I think I have mentioned this part of Collaboratory challenge.

Any successful meetings should be based on clear agenda, properly drafted and circulated notes and next action items. If we can cut short the meeting or able to cancel an unproductive meeting then the next question would be how we can get the best out of any meetings? I think answer to this would be find the collaborative  platform such as confluence which would not be a blocker for teams but the right helping hand. So, once we can set the culture and such collaborative mindset then it would improve the overall productivity by a big margin. 

I had many meetings which we cut short(i.e. finished 30 meetings with in 15 minutes) and used the time to complete something more important deliverables in that day.