Play of the Month: Keep your meetings focused!

[Lauren McGoodwin]

We’ve all been in meetings that feel like a drag. A lack of structure can confuse the participants and prevent work from moving forward. Don’t let bad meetings lead to more meetings.

Try running the Page-led Meetings Play, and learn how to integrate page-led collaboration, enhancing your sync time and maximizing productivity

A page as a high-quality written document that lays out needed context, meeting goals, and key decisions.

Participants are asked to read the page at the start of the meeting and refer to it throughout. That way, everyone is on the same page – literally – ensuring a more effective meeting.

If you prefer to watch how this works, check out this Instagram reel for a quick tutorial.

How do you like your meetings to be structured? Do you think the Page-led Meetings play is one you’d try?

We’d really like to hear from you, so please add a comment below to share your thoughts! 💭

(PS: By adding a comment, you’ll be one step closer to the Play as a Team kudos badge!)

[Amanda Barber]

This is great! I like the idea of providing this as the agenda/pre-work to maximize time together.

[Lauren McGoodwin]

@Amanda Barber You can share it as pre-work or give everyone the first 5 mins in the meeting to read the page!

[Alyssa Towns]

It is critical to have a mutual understanding and shared expectations following a meeting. I love how the page provides all the good stuff in a centralized location! 

P.S. I included this Playbook in a blog I wrote for Clockwise! Once it's published, I'll come back here and share the link. It's about effectively managing recurring meetings.

[Andy Gladstone]

Oooohhhh. @Alyssa Towns  welcome to the Atlassian Community! Please do share once published. 

[Lauren McGoodwin]

@Alyssa Towns Yes! Please do—and agree on the point about making sure your meeting hs shared understanding and expectations.

[Alyssa Towns]

Hooray! It's live! Manage Recurring Meetings Effectively

[Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_]

I really like the idea of using this play in situations where a specific decision has to be made by the end of the meeting ⚖️

Also, I love reading about all of these (new) ways of working! I just hope I'll have the time to try some of these in the foreseeable future 💡

[Lauren McGoodwin]

@Tomislav Tobijas _Koios_ Yes, I think this page really sets the tone and expectations that the meeting will end in making specific decisions!

[Andy Gladstone]

I use this play to avoid the meeting altogether! By creating the page in advance, and sharing it with the attendees, much of the input needed that required the meeting in the first place gets into the page - and either cuts the meeting tome required down or even allows a full cancellation! The best gift you can give is the gift of time back in the day.

[Lauren McGoodwin]

@Andy Gladstone You are making workplace dreams come true when you're able to replace a meeting with a page altogether!

[Laurie Sciutti]

Thank you, @Lauren McGoodwin ! In the event you can't use this to eliminate a meeting (looking at you @Andy Gladstone 😆), would you recommend combining the Meeting Notes Confluence template info with the page-led meeting template or would you keep them separate?

I'm a big proponent of including agenda / expectations in meeting invites and tend to skip those that don't have it.  If everyone got onboard with this, we'd be so much more productive!

[efavreau]

@Laurie SciuttiCombined into one. I turn the agenda into the minutes, by editing the agenda page, and capturing details live during the meeting. No need for more than one template for me. Minutes are done when the meeting is done. No time wasted afterward trying to clean things up or remember details either.

[Salih Tuç]

Seems great and a must-to-try, wondering about some other productive Confluence templates, though.

[Tehmina Aslam]

So we have set up themed daily standup

We have a day called Monday feed-forward; Wednesday is a Wednesday win.  

[Lauren McGoodwin]

I love that the themes coordinate with the days of the week! I'm sure your team enjoys this weekly ritual as well!

[Liz Tanner]

This is one of my favorite in the Play of the Month series. It is increasingly hard to find a Workspace and documentation that clients can access just by making them a guest where they don't need an account, a PIN that expires, or workarounds due to their org's security policies.

I experimented w/ this Play and template to test 1) ease of access for such clients, and 2) if it could serve as the running "source of truth" vibe for all pre-/post-meeting summaries. Not only did "out-of-the-box" Page-led Meetings work for both tests, but its editability meant I could just add an extra row on the first table to ask teams, do we need to meet? This eliminates two of my least favorite Project Lead items: an unnecessary meeting and group Slack interruptions to ask about meetings.

This Play's template rolls several needs into one: a guest-friendly, running, standardized source of truth document that's recording project and comms details. This is my top Play and template so far.

[efavreau]

While I don't call it a page-led meeting, I believe every meeting should follow this guidance to some degree. The only part I disagree with was

• Start the meeting with a silent pre-read of the page

Don't do it silently. People could be a minute late, people just arrived in a hurry (even if virtual), share the page and verbally call out the high-level points to ground and center everyone. Most don't read the link sent ahead of time. However...

If this is how you run meetings, people tend to try to get there on time, because they appreciate the you aren't wasting their time. You're organized with the setup beforehand, stay on track during, and sending the minutes afterward.

As a page, you now have an artifact that doesn't live in only email.

Great play!

[Ted Nieblas]

This is a great idea in concept, but how do you account for new information or questions that come up during the meeting? The free flow of information is vital to innovation and having a structured feedback mechanism such as this could be limiting in some scenarios.

[efavreau]

Bring structured doesn't mean information isn't free-flowing. Meetings should rarely be a a free-for-all, but directed to be respectful of people's time.

When we have our quarterly planning, we have open discussion about points from the agenda that we put in our page. Then when we reach consensus or have questions we can't answer right then, or someone brings up something we hadn't thought of, we write it all down into the same page, so the meeting agenda turns into meeting minutes, and all that great stuff doesn't get lost to memory.

The page then serves as a springboard if we need to have a "part 2" to the meeting to start addressing those items.