Meeting structures and guidelines 

Relevant Participation: Ask yourself who actually needs to participate and what the specific roles/need is from the different participants when inviting people to a meeting and ask yourself if you are needed in all the meetings you are invited to. 

Always ODA: Always provide the Objective, Desired Outcome and Agenda of the meeting when sending an invitation (or ensure that the participants know this when they get the invitation)

Space for life: Meetings last 25 minutes or 50 minutes, the brain needs space between meetings. The standard is also to allow participants to move meetings when there are not too many participants. 

Consider remote participants: When mixing remote and physical meetings, everyone should bring up the meeting on their laptop (with webcam) in order for remote participants to see all faces clearly, participants should indicate their form of attendance in advance

Background: As we grow as a company, our complexity is also increasing. This means more teams and more coordination, which drives the amount of meetings we have. Though we appreciate meetings and value transparency, we also realize that there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We need to not only have time for meetings, but also time to think and to execute on tasks. Thus, we have developed common guidelines and structures for our meetings to help us be effective in our work. 

Meeting definition: A meeting is a pre-defined assembly of 2 or more people for discussing a specific topic or agenda. They can be either physical or virtual

What we want to achieve: 

⭐ Effective meetings 

⭐ A reasonable amount of meeting

⭐ Time to produce things outside of meetings

⭐ Time to breathe between meetings

❤️ Be human: Prioritize what’s best done face to face. Build relationship and trust, care, discuss complex matters. Leave space to listen to peoples’ concerns. Be generous with one another, and pay attention to one another. 

✔️Be prepared: The host is responsible for ensuring all participants know what is needed from them, each participant is responsible for being prepared or letting the host know in advance if they will not be able to prepare in time. 

👁️Be open: as a default calendars should be open, and rather put specific events on private when needed. It makes it much easier for people to coordinate meetings and understand when you are available. 

☸️ Host: A meeting must have a host, which is the person who guides the conversation. This person is responsible for keeping the time and ensuring the meeting purpose is achieved. The person should state the purpose and/or agenda at the start of the meeting and summarize key takeaways and to-do’s at the end of the meeting. If the host is not living up to their responsibilities, participants can kindly call out that it would be great if the host were to structure the discussion. 

⏲️ Meeting structure: It is recommended to divide most meetings in three parts 10% - 80% - 10%

10%: Land & check-in - state the purpose of the meeting and create presence  

80%: Core of the meeting - fulfill the purpose

10%: Summarize - state the key-takeaways and to-do’s if any with clear timeline

🗃️Stacking meetings: We always check each-others calendar availability prior to booking a meeting. When possible, we aim to stack meetings together in the morning or after-noon. When we remember to end our meetings with the 5 or 10 minute buffer, it enables people to have back-to-back meetings, without being exhausted or not being able to go to the bathroom and enables them to shift mindset. 

🥘Lunch: 11:30-12:30 should be avoided to ensure people have sufficient time to have their lunch. 

Block time when you need to, to ensure you have time for lunch, 

📆 Cancellations: There is no shame in deleting a meeting if one realizes that the meeting could rather be a slack announcement. Though, we aim to do this as early as possible to allow for people to plan their days optimally. 

🔍Systematically evaluate meetings: Improve or remove them continuously. Merge, split or remove meetings. Collect them on same day. Look for ways to reduce to total load.

📎 Make them a-sync available. Leave trace in Quip, Miro and/or Meet recording or similar for others to catch up later.

Join or leave at your own responsibility. If you don’t add or get value from it, you should not join / leave.