The 10 Rules for Productive Meetings

2019 has been a busy year over at Landing: we’ve launched Landing.work for remote contractors to find their new roles or projects, we’ve setup a brand new office in Lisbon to better accommodate our growing team, and a few other things to be announced soon!

The main thing we’ve been actively looking into is our team’s productivity and we’ve been highly self-critical about it… starting with meetings. Having unproductive meetings can be so much damaging for your organisation healthiness, and our own meetings were becoming a source of underperformance…

After some research including key advice from personalities such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, we came up with 10 rules for our team to have better productive meetings. Here they are:

1. No large meetings! 5 people is already a crowd…
2. 30 minutes: Great! 45 minutes: OK! 1 hour: OK’ish. 2 hours is definitely not OK!
3. Avoid “status update” meetings at all costs… E-mail instead?
4. For more informal moments, use the available open office areas instead of booking a room space.
5. Start and finish on time. If you’re late, don’t disrupt the discussion and keep up with the agenda.
6. Open up your mind to other people’s opinions, speaking for 3 minutes in a row is a monologue…
7. If you aren’t adding value, feel free to walk out of the meeting or drop off the call!
8. Be mindful of remote participants. If you’re the one who’s remote, speak up or raise your hand when you have something relevant to say.
9. Keep your laptops closed at all times unless you’re the Meeting Owner. Stay mentally and physically present!
10. Make sure the agenda is shared beforehand, conversation flow is productive and there’s a proper follow-up with concrete tasks, ownerships and deadlines.

We’ve started implementing these rules recently and in order to measure success, we’ve asked all Meeting Owners to check how many rules were broken after each meeting takes place and report back to me, so we can have some data points to understand if these rules are feasible and, ultimately, how our meetings can become more productive.

Hope this helps someone.