How can we make our meetings productive. This is a billion-dollar question. Even if each one of us improve our meetings by 1% we save $$$ s for our organizations.
In this article, we look at one such technique called Scrum Your Meetings:
Why Scrum Your Meetings:
In the first few pages of the book called Design Sprint, there is a picture which is worth million dollars. ( Picture modified a bit based from the book)
Normal Work Day for Most Companies:
#Scrum Your Meetings Version
In the teams I have been recently we have been trying this and seeing really great results. Thanks to my teammates for suggesting this technique.
How to #Scrum The Meetings :
Work the Work is one way to think of this. The host of the meetings invites people. Recommend time not more than 60 minutes for a session. The goal is what can we get done in 60 minutes.
Step 1 - Goal Setting 10 minutes
The hosts present what is the goal that we are trying to achieve as a team in the next hour.
Notice the way the doing column does not have any more than one task for the team. This style of work is called Single Piece workflow.
Sometime you may do more than one task but as a general rule Don’t to start anything that cannot be done in an hour.
Step 2: Close IM, phones , chats etc. Step 3: Start Task ( Swarming around the first task )
The entire group works on the first task. Sometimes this means we are talking, sometime we may be writing a document, it depends on the work.
Suppose our goal is to create some document, we can start a shared document on google docs, or word docs and share it on a large screen. The first person types and others contribute to the document. You can also try a variant of this called Mobbing.
At 10 minutes the keyboard moves to the next person. Complete the first task and pull the next one. This way everyone has to work and no one gets to chill back and just talk.
Step 3: Close with action items or parking lot items
Conclusion
What if we can actually go home and eat dinner with the family and not worry about work. Imagine how much we can save by not context switching. Every time someone randomly pings you in a chat, you are going to get distracted from the work you are doing now.
This kind of working even if your teams can practice once a week and once a week do a no meeting day. You will see infinite improvements to productivity and you will see many satisfied employees returning back home with a smiling face every day.
–Go for it, be the change and make it happen