The Most Common Types of Meetings and How to Make Them Better
Meetings are not equal meetings! Instead each kind of meeting has its reason for existence and specific ways to make it more productive. Therefore, we will see the different types of meetings and see how each one can be improved.
There is SO MUCH advice out there about how to run meetings, and most of it is just useless.
It’s not that the advice is wrong, per se. It’s just not specific enough, because a meeting is not a meeting.
A meeting can be a board meeting or can be a sprint planning meeting or can be a team building meeting. All of those meetings have very different purposes and formats, and the advice given on one kind of meeting would not apply to another kind of meeting.
There is some general advice that works for most kinds of meetings. The most important of these general meeting advice are as follows:
● Clear meeting objective and agenda
● Timeboxed meetings
● Limited participation
● Regular meetings
● Moderated meetings
● Walking and standing meetings
● Post meeting recap
● Team transparency in between meetings
You can read more about these general hacks on how to make meetings more productive here:
However, the best hacks to make meetings more effective depend on the type of meetings.
Which raises the question: what are the different kinds of meetings? Therefore, we will define different types of meetings below and see for each meeting the most important things to keep in mind to make them more productive.
The most important kinds of meetings are as follows:
● Team Building Meeting
● Status Update Meetings
● Work Planning Meeting
● Decision Meetings
● Problem Solving Meetings
● Information Meetings
● Idea Generation Meetings
● Execution Meetings
We can categories all meeting types as follows:
As you can see above, there are four main types of meetings:
● Focus cycle meetings
● Functional meetings
● Execution meetings
● Team building meetings
Focus cycle meetings that are required to work in sprints, or more generally in focus cycles. There are two main meetings: work planning meetings at the beginning of the focus cycles, and status update meetings also called sprint review and sprint retrospective meetings at the end of the focus cycle.
Functional meetings are meetings to get a particular kind of work done. They can be divided into:
● information meetings,
● idea generation meetings,
● decision meetings and
● problem solving meetings.
Execution meetings are meetings with the purpose of getting our main work executed. Generally, work will be executed by individuals but individuals can work in pairs or in a trio, which would be a pair or a trio meeting.
Team building meetings have the specific purpose of improving the team cohesion, alignment or motivation.
Below we will explain more about each kind of meeting.
1. Team Building Meeting
Team building meetings are designed to specifically obtain the main advantages of meetings:
● Team cohesion
● Team motivation
● Team alignment
● Team inclusion
While these benefits are great, in traditional team building meetings you do not get any actual work done. Therefore, they can be quite expensive. If you could obtain the above benefits with other kinds of work meetings, you would be able to save a lot in terms of the time of the team members.
Personally, we at Focus Cycles (www.focuscycles.com) have been able to obtain the above advantages of team cohesion, motivation, alignment and inclusion by having regular status update and work planning meetings, without the need for explicit team building meetings.
2. Status Update Meetings (Focus Cycle Meeting)
Status update meetings are meetings in which team members report on their work progress. Together with work planning meetings they make up the category of focus cycle meetings.
Focus cycles are short periods of time which are preceded by a work planning meeting and ended by a status update meeting, and during which the team members focus 100% on the execution of the planned tasks. You might have heard of them as sprints.
Status update meetings should take place at regular intervals, for example once every month or once every week.
They should be short and timeboxed. That means that any question or discussion about work that goes beyond a status update should be deferred to a later discussion.
3. Work Planning Meeting (Focus Cycle Meeting)
Work planning meetings just like status update meetings are focus cycle meetings. While in status update meetings we talk about what has been accomplished in the past, in work planning meetings we talk about what we want to accomplish in the future. Thus these work planning meetings should be held at regular intervals, for example once a week or once a month.
It is possible to combine status update meetings with work planning meetings. For example, I like to have meetings twice a week in which during the first 15 minutes everybody talks about what has been accomplished and during the second 15 minutes everybody talks about what should be accomplished in the future.
Status update and work planning meetings are great meetings for team cohesion, team motivation and team inclusion.
The regular nature of the meetings also serve to eliminate the danger of roadblocks blocking work for too long. It has been my experience that many times certain team members do not actively communicate roadblocks to each other, which can cause work to stop for weeks. A simple question at the regular status update and work planning meeting can prevent this: Is there any work that can not be done due to waiting for other people’s work?
Both forms of focus cycles meetings, status update and work planning meeting, are best done if you have one system to plan, and record your work. We at Focus Cycles, (www.focuscyles.com) have developed a unique productivity software that does exactly that and thereby makes focus cycles meetings much more productive.
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4. Decision Meetings (Functional Meeting)
Decision meetings are one kind of functional meeting. Functional meetings are meetings in which a certain kind of work is being done. This kind of work can generally be of 4 kinds:
● Decision making
● Information distribution
● Problem solving
● Idea generation
Decision meetings, as the name says, are about taking decisions. Generally these would be important decisions as otherwise you would not need a meeting. Decision meetings are an alternative to either having only one person decide or having multiple people give their input via asynchronous communication, like in email or chat message.
In most cases, asynchronous communication via email should be the preferred method of taking decisions. This is because asynchronous communication does not disrupt the work flow of team members. However, when a voting is needed or when the email communication would require a lot of back and forth, a meeting can be the better alternative.
If you are going to have a meeting to make an important decision make sure you only invite those people that are able to influence the decision. Also, when you do invite members to participate make sure that they give an input into the decision making process.
Personally, I do not like to hold decision meetings. Instead, I let decisions be made by the individuals most involved in the matter at hand or discuss the decision via email.
5. Problem Solving Meetings (Functional Meeting)
Problem solving meetings, as the name says, are about solving problems. Generally these would be important and complex problems that need the input from several team members as otherwise you would not need a meeting. Problem solving meetings are an alternative to either having only one person solve the problem or having multiple persons give their input via asynchronous communication.
Just as for decision meetings, in most cases meetings are not required but instead the problem can be solved by either asynchronous communication or by just two team members getting together.
6. Information Meetings (Functional Meeting)
Information meetings are meetings where the team leader or also team members share information with the whole team.
Generally, this kind of meetings should be avoided as it is just as good to distribute information via asynchronous means of communication, like email, or messenger apps.
There is an argument to be made that the communication can better be delivered in a verbal way rather than in writing, but even then there is the alternative for team members to communicate via voice or video messages.
So the information meeting should only take place in case there is some fundamental new information or the team leader wants to use the meeting to motivate the team.
7. Idea Generation Meetings (Functional Meeting)
Idea generation meetings or innovation meetings are meetings which are not about taking a certain decision nor are they about providing information to everyone. Rather they are about letting everyone contribute ideas to potentially come up with new ways of doing things or breakthroughs that the team had not thought about before.
These kinds of meetings can be dangerous as they are often without a clear purpose. Since the purpose is not clear it is important that these meetings are moderated. The moderators need to ensure that everyone gets to participate, that the agenda is being followed and that the meetings end on time.
8. Execution Meetings
Execution meetings are meetings in which only two or three team members work together to get work done. They often do so on a continuous basis, potentially for hours, and do not need to schedule a specific meeting. During the “meeting” the pair or the trio focus on execution of work. This can be a very productive way of working, that in case it is done with two people is called pair working. We have discussed the advantages of pair working here:
While working in pairs you are communicating with another person, but in fact it does not have the other attributes of meetings. You can have a very productive eight hour pair working session without wasting time, as you are really executing work, only that you do it together with another person.
9. Meeting Frequencies
We can display the four main types of meetings on the graph below, with two axis:
● Vertical Y-axis: the work execution
● Horizontal X-axis: frequency
Both team building meetings as well as focus cycles meetings are not about getting work itself done but instead prepare for the work to get done in a more productive way. They are thus meta-work meetings. Team building meetings are about getting better team cohesion, inclusion and motivation, Focus Cycles meetings are about better work planning and work optimization.
On the other hand both functional as well as work execution meetings are about getting actual work done.
Both functional as well as team building meetings should be held seldomly and ad hoc only. On the other hand both work execution meetings as well as focus cycles meetings should be held frequently and regularly.
