By Ethan Nash

“As a leader, you must constantly drive effective communication. Meetings must be deliberate and intentional - your organizational rhythm should value purpose over habit and effectiveness over efficiency.” ~Chris Fussell

As an agency, we’ve interviewed thousands of leaders and employees, and a common complaint we hear is I’m in too many meetings. This may be true. However, as the effectiveness of meetings improves, you may find that the answer is not to have fewer meetings (and in some cases, believe it or not, the answer may be more meetings). If meetings are accomplishing their goal and helping people to better manage their work and work relationships, people stop seeing meetings as an assault on their precious and finite time and begin to view them as an opportunity for better performance, increased productivity, and most importantly, greater workplace satisfaction.

The right quantity and duration of your meetings will always be situational: it depends on the makeup of your team, the nature of the work, and the reality of your workflow. We’ve seen teams successfully manage with just a single one-hour group meeting a month. Other groups will need to meet at least once a week for several hours. (And some may even need to meet for daily check-ins.) You’ll have to find the right balance for you. Experiment with this and get feedback from your team members.

The following is a recommendation for four types of meetings and their frequency. Again, there is no one-size-fits-all, so consider this a menu of meeting options. Use your wisdom and intuition (and the feedback from your team!) to figure out how to tweak this to make it work for you.

The Daily “Stand Up” Meeting (5 to 15 minutes)

Many teams have benefited from implementing a meeting that occurs once a day (or a couple of times a week) where all team members get one or two minutes maximum to report on their focus for the day, any roadblocks to accomplishing tasks, and to ask quick clarification questions. It’s called a “stand up” because the discomfort of standing reminds people that this is a speedy meeting. (You can encourage

people to stand up even if you work remotely. Just remember to actually wear pants that day.) There is no need for a written agenda for these meetings. This is not a time to debate, make lots of decisions, or deep dive into any one topic. It’s simply a mechanism for ensuring people have clarity and direction for the day, there is no duplicate tasks wasting people’s time, and for helping to inform any follow-up conversations, ad hoc meetings, and agenda items for the more structured meetings. This isn’t about micromanaging – it’s primarily about giving everyone insight into what their teammates are working on, which can enhance collaboration and learning. For example, if I know Tara is working on X project that is similar to my project, I now know I can go directly to her for ideas and questions rather than filling up everyone’s inbox with questions that are irrelevant to 90% of the group. This actually saves everyone time in the long run. (Slow down to speed up!)

In cases where the team is super large, this may be impractical. Consider splitting the team up into relevant groups for the stand-up meetings or just do it at the start of every week and take a little more time.

The Weekly Structured Meeting (60 to 90 minutes)

It’s called a “structured” meeting for good reason – everything about this meeting needs to be intentional and well-designed or they risk sucking our souls and becoming time-wasters. When these are done well, people get the information and have the discussions that often happen over a series of drawn-out emails and individual conversations, which, once again, saves people time and energy in the aggregate. (In Section 3, we explore the ingredients of a highly effective structured meeting.)

Again, depending on the workflow and makeup of the team, this may happen weekly, every other week, or maybe (at least!) monthly. This is the meeting where you need an agenda. Here, your team should have clear topics of discussion and do everything you can not to go off-topic. This is where teams can give more in-depth work updates (if they are relevant to the whole group), discuss and make decisions, debate on important matters, provide training, and team-build. These meetings are only effective if participants clearly understand the topics of discussion in advance so they can process their thoughts and ideas. If you spend half the meeting explaining what we are discussing, people’s eyes start to roll to the back of their heads, and the things that need to get covered rarely do.

Keep in mind that research suggests that 90 minutes is the optimal human limit for focusing intensely on a task, which is why we suggest keeping these under an hour and a half if possible.

The Monthly (Or Quarterly) Deep-Dive Meetings (3 hours to all day)

When finessed, these meetings can be invaluable. This is often where you cover the “important but not urgent” stuff, to use Stephen Covey’s language – the types of things that will add the most enduring value to your team or organization. Often, this includes discussing critical strategic decisions, working on team commitments, planning and prioritizing for the upcoming quarter or year, getting to know and understand each other at a deeper level, working on group projects, goal setting, or engaging in important learning activities. We often advise teams to just take one to a few topics to cover – the kind of topics that require robust discussion and debate that can’t be accomplished in the shorter weekly meetings.

In the spirit of saving everyone time, teams often rely on shorter meetings to cover huge topics, which results in those topics dragging on throughout multiple meetings (or never getting covered at all) and critical decisions being made without the appropriate level of dialogue.

Psychologists and neuroscientists now understand that the human brain does a poor job at “context shifting.” Our brains have a warm-up period when focusing on a task. If we quickly shift from topic to topic, we waste cognitive energy as our brains work to transition from one subject to another. By spending an hour or more in a meeting on one important topic, you maximize the brain power of each individual in the room. (And consider taking a break after 90 minutes of work to restore your brains to the optimal focus level.)

The Pop-Up Meeting (As long as needed)

This one is simple: there will be people with whom you need to meet with and topics that must be discussed that can’t wait until the weekly or monthly or quarterly meeting. In order to maintain the structure and integrity of the regularly scheduled meetings, don’t shy away from these pop-up meetings.

What annoys people more than an itch in the center of their back is spending time on topics in group meetings that are only relevant to a handful of folks. The full-group meetings should be reserved for topics that directly or indirectly affect everyone’s job. Grab the people you need to talk with and have a meeting outside of the regular meeting. And of course, respect people’s time. Do we really need to schedule a 30-minute meeting to discuss something that can more efficiently be handled asynchronously?