So I often get asked, how often should you meet the team? The first thing is meetings kind of suck, right? Most people groan when they think of meetings, so you should never have meetings unless they’re absolutely necessary.
Often when you have a new team, it’s a good idea to have a catch up with them fairly often, because you want to check in with them, that can either be via chat. It’s never a good idea to do a meeting if you could do it via memo. Or often these tools like Slack, for example, give you the option to stay in touch with people without having to hog them onto a Zoom call.
Also, culturally, it’s very important to keep in mind that some cultures don’t love being on video. Or some people don’t like being on video, especially the more quiet type that aren’t always sort of being expressive and loud. They don’t want to be on the video, so offer them the choice. We do audio calls in my business.
When I had a young team of managers and we had 65 people, I was meeting with them every morning for about 10 minutes, audio. Later, we moved to weekly because we have a good cadence. And it’s still only about seven to 10 minutes a week. It’s the only time we get together. Because when you have everyone on that call, there’s a lot of man hours, or woman hours to account for. And if you have 10 people on a call for 10 minutes that is 100 minutes. So be careful how you spend the resource of your business. So that’s sort of my tips on cadence.
Also, if they’re in different time zones, try and pick a time that doesn’t suck. And I would also recommend Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, rather than Monday or Friday. My reason for that: Mondays, most people hate Mondays. I take Mondays off, so I’m not gonna meet on my day off. But most people hate Mondays and really they’re just recovering from the weekend. It’s a bad time to assault them with a meeting. And Fridays, I think most people have faded and run out of energy by Friday. No matter what you discuss, it’s not going to carry forward until next week. There’s no energy for that. So we meet on Thursday. Because we’ve run through the week, we can have a good sort of catch up and get our position on the week, and we still got a whole day to implement urgent things or important things before we have that weekend off. So that’s why we chose that. But I would pick Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday for those reasons.
So there’s a question you didn’t ask but I think you should be asking that relates to team meetings.
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