How to have Productive Meetings

Meetings!! I love meetings! But most people hate them! I suspect that’s because they can easily go off the rails.

So today we’re talking about how to make meetings productive. I’ll discuss steps you can take before, during, and after the meeting.

Why do I love meetings?

They help me know what’s going on, help team members give and receive feedback, and are an essential part of making games. When meetings aren’t being productive and don’t help the team make the game, it’s easy to hate them. So let’s look at how to turn that around. There are three places where a meeting can go off the rails…. before, during and afterwards. Let’s dive in.

BEFORE the Meeting

Consider Purpose, Duration, and Attendees:

• Purpose
  • What are the outcomes of it? What decision needs to be made in this meeting? Do you need to have this conversation now? Can you have it later?
  •  You should goldilocks how many meetings you have. That is, have just the perfect number of meetings.
    • It’s pretty clear to most people that too many is bad. People tune out, less gets done on the game itself.
    • But too few is also bad. In this case you end up having long rambling meetings to go over all the built up conversations. Since conversations aren’t happening in a timely manner, people get started on work without all the information they need and then that work needs to get thrown out or redone.
  •  Think about what benefit people are getting from being there together. If your meetings don’t have much interaction between people, then consider whether it even needs to be a meeting. Maybe it can be a video or a dedicated Slack/Discord channel.
    • Note: I’m particularly thinking of bland daily standups where people tune out as updates just sound exactly the same every single day.
  • You want people to be talking to each other, asking questions, giving feedback and so on. Interacting, not in monologues.
  • The classic way to define a purpose is to create an Agenda ahead of time. For recurring meetings:
    • Setup a single page/area where people can put their agenda items. This area’s location shouldn’t change meeting to meeting.
    • If nothing is on the agenda, no meeting!
    • This can be hard to establish and might fail depending on your team. Still, it’s worth giving this a red hot go since when it works it’s magic.
• Duration — How long should the meeting be?
  • When creating a meeting, think about the minimum time you need. Don’t just schedule a 1 hour time slot when 15 minutes is enough. People will often fill up the available time with extra words.
  • This is particularly true of recurring meetings because an extra 15 minutes with 10 people on the team every day mounts up very quickly to be a lot of time the team isn’t directly working on the game.
• Attendees — Who needs to be invited?
  • Is everyone needed in the meeting? Why? What is each person’s role in the meeting?
  • If they just need to know the information and will not have opportunity to ask questions, then they can just get a short summary after the meeting.
  • Don’t ask juniors to decide if they should or shouldn’t be in a meeting. You might think you’re being nice to them so they feel included. But actually they’ll feel obligated to join to get brownie points, even when they’re unlikely to contribute anything.
  • Do you need all attendees present for the entire duration of the call? Group items in your agenda so individuals or groups can leave early.

DURING the Meeting

1. Avoid pauses. Especially if you’re running the meeting.
   • Keep a consistent pause time of 2-3 seconds, then move on. People will learn to speak up quickly. Caution here though. For team members who aren’t comfortable jumping in, talk to them in 1:1s to find out how to support them and allow their voices to be heard.
   • Don’t be afraid to finish a meeting early.
2. Stick to the agenda.
3. Listen for Long conversations and stop them when needed.
   • To do this, you need to give a good reason for halting the conversation. Ask yourself these questions:
     • Is the conversation going around in circles?
     • Is everyone contributing?
     • Does everyone need to contribute?
     • Does a decision on this need to be made today?
     • Was this even on the agenda/expected?
   • Figure out when and how you’ll pick up the conversation. That might be:
     • At the end of this meeting after other agenda items are addressed.
     • If this is in a recurring or daily meeting, add to next meeting instance.
     • Other options are later today, or next week or when this is part of the milestone.
     • Or it might be setting up a dedicated temporary channel to discuss the problem over multiple weeks.
     • Your decision here will depend on who needs to be in the conversation. Most likely it’s a sub-group of people in the current meeting.
   • Finally, with all this information on your mind, interrupt the people speaking and say something like:
     • This is a great conversation and one we need to have. But let’s put a pin in this right now since [insert your reason]. I’ve made a note to talk about it [insert your timeline].
     • If you don’t have all the details to fill in, then just give people a promise that you’ll figure out when and how to have the conversation by a specific timeline (e.g. end of today).
     • Be Jennuine in whatever you say. You care about the people, you’re not just stopping them from talking just because.
   • Of course it might happen that the conversation is more like an argument between two people and doesn’t need to be picked up at all. If that’s the case, then you probably need to deep dive into what’s going on between those people for that topic and use some conflict resolution skills.
4. Stick to the chosen time for the meeting. Watch the clock and be absolutely brutal about it.
   • If you’re an attendee, tell everyone you’re leaving since the time is up and then leave. There should be no need to give an excuse.
   • If you’re running the meeting, wrap it up. Keep note of everything that wasn’t done on the agenda and move that to the next meeting or schedule a new meeting.
   • It’s hard to be brutal here, but the problem is that it can be a slippery slope.

AFTER the Meeting

• Was the decision made that needed to be made? If not, do you need another meeting? If so, will that meeting just end up the same? Do you need to tackle the problem in a different way like via voting, sub-committees, multiple prototypes?
  • Sub-committees or getting the two most passionate people talking about the issue are great. They can nut out the details and report back to the rest of the team.
• Where appropriate, use 1:1s to find out what other attendees thought about that meeting. Sometimes a quick chat in a corridor or DM is enough here.
• Think about what went right and wrong, then iterate on your problem solving for meetings.

If you’re not the producer or person running the meeting, some of this is hard to execute on. It might be easier for you to schedule a 1:1 with your producer to talk through what you are noticing and what you need. Or just point them to this post!!

Conclusions

That’s all we have time for today! Thanks for reading.

Remember: This is general advice and it might not be right for you and your team, even if you’re the one who wrote in the question! For me to help better, it needs to be a dialog between me, and you, and your entire team. Hire me to consult for you, check out my main website: jennsand.com.