Meetings @ RF

Meetings should only be scheduled when necessary

Meetings are easy ways to waste time. It is important to weigh the opportunity cost of calling a meeting. If you schedule a 1 hour meeting with 5 people, it is not just 1 hour but 5 hours of company time being used. Is the meeting important enough to call for 5 hours of company time?

Schedule for 2/3 of the time you think you need

When we are decided how long to schedule a meeting for, we often account for distractions and getting off track. This is unproductive. If we schedule in time to go off track, we will more than likely go off track. However, if we schedule what we think should be an hour long meeting for 40 minutes instead, people tend to be more focused and motivated to complete what needs to be done in a shorter amount of time.

Always have an agenda and goals BEFORE the meeting begins

In order to keep a meeting on track and to make sure that everyone is on the same page before the meeting begins, you should always have an agenda and goals prepped for the meeting. You want to explicitly communicate the goals of the meeting and what you hope to get out of it at the beginning and overview and assign action items at the end of the meeting. Consider these questions:

1. What is the definition of done? What is the thing we are walking away with a.k.a the “product”

2. What does success look like? What are desired outcomes? What will we measure success by?

3. When is it due?

4. When are we going to collect feedback?

Meeting Event Invites should always have a description

Don't assume anybody knows the purpose for the meeting. Always explain why you are calling the meeting, what will be discussed, and anything other people should come prepared with.

• The larger the meeting, the less effective they tend to be (above ~5 people)

  • Weigh the opportunity cost of the meeting

    • Ex: 1 hour long meeting with 4 people, is 4 hours of company time

• Before scheduling a meeting, ask yourself “could this be a document, an email, or a slack post?”

• Meetings are good for conversations. For example:

  • When you are trying to debate, decide, or brainstorm something

  • When it’s a sensitive subject or when a lot of context is needed

  • When you want to build connections on the team or when the purpose is to socialize

Every Monday, the team meets at 9:30am for a 30 minute team meeting. In order to keep these meetings productive and timely, we've implemented this strategy. When deciding what to prepare to share with the group, think through this question:

Is there anything that I should mention or talk about that everyone should be aware of or know about to help them do their role better and keep our lines of communication open?

• We won’t tell you what you should be presenting on

• Let us know if we need to know something. If you share,

  • Tell us the timeline

  • How it affects us

  • Only share the metrics if it’s needed - we don’t need to know everything

Tuesdays and Thursdays are No Meeting Days at Rareform. This means that no internal meetings or external meeting that require another Rareform employee should take place on a Tuesday or Thurday (i.e., any meeting that needs more than one RF team member on it must take place on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday).

The hope behind this is that we will

1. Schedule less meetings in general

2. Have intentional days where we can work without inturruption

Once a month, the team meets for a Goal Meeting where the team is given an overview of the month's board meeting presentation and everyone checks in on where they are at with the year's goals.

At this meeting, Alec will also announce the month's challenge. This is something the team is challenged to think about and implement through the month. See an example of a monthly goal below:

February 2021's challenge: Efficiency

Where are you finding efficiency? Do it. Implement it. Stop waiting.

How are you helping your colleagues?

Efficiency isn’t always fast - it’s being efficient with other’s time as well

• Giving others what they need to get what you need

Twice a year, the team meets for a two day retreat to define and align on the goals for the year. In January the team will meet to define goals for the year. In June the team will meet to review performance, to plan, and reassess goals for the year.