The synchronous analysis of meetings

2024-03-08 · 4 min · medium

Balancing sync and async communication in the remote work era, part 1.

In a distributed team, getting the balance between synchronous and asynchronous communication right is hard. This post draws on my experience of both: what each is good for, where each falls short, and how to get more out of meetings.

Sync communication

• Fast nourishment
• Perishable
• Easily digestible (for most)

Async communication

• Harder to produce
• Strong and potent
• Lasts a very long time

A recap

But we're already using asynchronous communication and tooling.

Most companies don't measure how they communicate, so nobody knows how well it works. The focus is on delivering value for customers and stakeholders, and the tools used to do that go unexamined.

Many of us believed, correctly for a while, that remote work would mean fewer interruptions and more focus. Instead the interruptions followed us, as meetings. That's a behavioural problem. It's us.

Meetings have drawbacks. This isn't an exhaustive list, but they're worth restating:

• They're easy. Not a flaw in itself, but in a distributed company a meeting is the easiest way to communicate, which makes it easy to overuse.
• The loudest voice wins. The best idea should win a decision, and in a meeting that's hard. Not everyone wants to speak up, whether through personality, language or needing time to put their thoughts into words. That isn't inclusive.
• They can be expensive. Does the meeting create enough value to justify everyone's time? There's an opportunity cost too: what higher-value work is it delaying?
• Decisions are fast. A decision is only as good as the thinking behind it. Sync conversation rewards fast thinking, which leaves no room to reflect, so we fall back on experience, biased by what we've done before.
• They're hard in a second language. Someone working in a second language has to translate what others say while assembling their own thoughts in that language. I've been told this is incredibly difficult.

Meetings have real benefits too:

• Connection. Long stretches of focused, isolated work can lose sight of why we're doing it. Meetings remind us of the mission and of achieving outcomes together.
• Focus on now. When something blows up or a critical decision is needed, a meeting is an efficient way to agree a course of action.

I've left out breadth versus depth on purpose, because it can be a strength or a weakness.

Meeting etiquette: evolve meetings

We could jump straight to moving some communication to async, but doing it isn't the hard part.

Changing how a team communicates needs strong relationships, agreed ways of working, rethought ceremonies, conversations with stakeholders and more. So start by improving the meetings you already have:

• No agenda, no attenda. A meeting without an agenda suggests nobody has thought about its objectives or outcomes. The organiser may just have forgotten, but asking for one builds the habit of thinking about a meeting's purpose.
• Prepare. Share presentations, documents or videos beforehand. Instead of spending the first half understanding the problem, the meeting can start with clarifying questions and produce better output faster.
• Start with information. If people aren't used to reading before meetings, try what Jeff Bezos called "the smartest thing we ever did at Amazon". Everyone spends the first 5-10 minutes silently reading a well-prepared memo, then the discussion begins.
• Let people write their thoughts. A shared document gives people who wouldn't otherwise speak a way to contribute. It's a simple change with real benefits: more inclusion, and better decisions from a wider group.
• Document the outcomes. Written once and read by many, it gives anyone who couldn't attend the context to act on the decision. Unless you need a verbatim record, it's more efficient than recording the meeting.

Each of these brings an async habit into a sync meeting to cover one of its weaknesses.

Scheduled meetings

What I've seen over time is the boiling frog. Every initiative over a career leaves behind a scheduled meeting, each taking a little more of your week, until a third of your working hours go to recurring meetings without you noticing.

The idea that being in meetings means being busy, and so productive, is outdated. So how do you weed your calendar? Here's what I've found useful:

• Check the agenda. What is the meeting for? If it's just passing on information, a document or a status update tool would do the job.
• Check your participation. How often do you actively take part? Or do you attend because it's in your calendar?
• Give feedback. If attendance isn't mandatory, do you care about the topic? Is it making you better? Talk to the meeting owner before you remove it from your calendar.

Not all scheduled meetings are bad, far from it. But long-running ones drift from their original intent and lose their impact, delivering less value over time. Many companies run meeting resets to deal with this.

Next time: what async looks like in practice, and some of the problems with "async" tooling.