MBA2296 Q&A Wednesday: How often should I meet with my team?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show, business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started by co-founder back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Sandy, and Sandy asks, hey, Omar, I have a smallish team, only five team members and myself.

0:46And my question is, how often should I meet with my team? Is once a week enough? Should I be doing two or three times a week? Is that micromanaging if I do so? We're all remote, but we're in similar time zones. And I want to give my team the autonomy to deserve. But at the same time, I want to make sure that we're running a tight ship. Would love your advice on this topic. Thanks so much. Love the podcast. Thanks, Sandy, for your great question. I absolutely love this question because I have some very strong opinions about meeting with your team. And this is a dilemma for a lot of people, especially people that run remote teams because they don't see their team every day in a physical office.

1:22They wanna know if their meeting cadence is too much or too little. Should you meet with everybody or maybe just the managers? What's the deal with meetings? And I'm gonna put this all to rest in today's episode. I'm gonna give you my advice when it comes to how often should you meet with your team, how long these meetings should be, what's the benefits of a regular scheduled meeting every single week, twice week, whatever it might be. and what are some of the cons of meeting too much? I'm a big believer that it's very hard to over-communicate. Communication is so important in your team for many reasons, but especially for remote teams.

1:56We're going to get into how often, how many, how long, so that you have a plan of action when it comes to meeting with your team on a regular basis. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. so sandy asks on q a wednesday how often should i meet with my team she's got a small team that's five people plus herself so it's six in total and that's actually important because when you have a smaller team it's actually easier to meet because you don't have that many people to sync up times with as well as the fact that there's enough time for everybody to talk when you do meet so here's my tldr right my too long didn't read or didn't listen answer to this question okay how often should you meet?

2:36And the answer is as often as possible. Yep, as much as possible. Now, that doesn't mean every time you meet, you have to meet for an hour or 90 minutes or whatever it might be. Frequency is actually more important than length here. What I mean by that is, in most cases, meeting with your team every single day for 10 minutes, for example, is probably better than you meeting once a week for an hour. Now, mind you, there's going to be times we're going to have to have a longer meeting because you need to make some decisions, you have creative brainstorming, you have longer discussions. And that makes sense.

3:09And in my experience, those types of meetings are not as frequent as your regular check-ins and syncs and making sure everybody's on the same page and kind of getting updates on how everybody's doing on their particular projects. In fact, I think that you probably don't need to have one of those in-depth brainstorming longer meetings that often, maybe once a month. Now, why? Why am I saying frequency is more important? Why am I saying that if you can meet every day with your team of six people, Sandy, then that's actually the best solution or the best cadence? Because the more you communicate with your team, the more trust you build, the better you work together, the less things fall through the cracks, less communication, the more in touch you are, the more you make sure that you catch something before it becomes a problem, the frequency actually matters.

3:58So let's say you did a daily standup. And I know companies that do this in the morning and in the evening, meaning like at the start of the shift, at the end of the shift, they meet for 10 minutes both times. But let's say you just start with once every day. Let's say an hour after you start working, you meet. So you give people an hour to kind of, you know, check their email, get settled in, start some work, and then they have their meeting. If you keep it a tight 10 minutes where you do a round robin, where basically people just share really quickly what they worked on yesterday, what they're working on today, if they have any blockers or any questions or need any help from anybody else.

4:32That's pretty much it. What I worked on yesterday. So it's update. Hey, this is what I completed, what I'm working on today. This is my focus. And hey, I don't have any blockers or actually I have a question for you. So-and-so, can you help me out with this offline or after the meeting? This allows everybody to just stay on point and you to get exposure to what everybody's working on and a chance for them to collaborate and to see if there's any synergies there and a chance to say, hey, I need help or I am stuck or please unblock my situation here. I can't move on in my task until you kind of step in and do your part.

5:07This is something I would recommend, especially if you have similar time zones. Now, I have a remote team that's across the world and our time zones are a little bit scattered, so it's not that easy to have a daily standup. But some of my departments are able to do this, like engineering. They have similar time zones, so they can do that. Customer support, they can do that. They have like their own virtual office and they can meet and just kind of check in with everybody every day. There's also like this great feeling of everybody just kind of saying good morning and showing up to work and knowing that they have colleagues and a sense of community and team.

5:40This is kind of like an intangible benefit of meeting frequently. Now, I talked about I was going to mention some of the cons of meeting very frequently. Now, some people worry that this might seem like micromanaging. And I'm here to tell you that's an unfounded fear because you are letting them do whatever they need to do to get the job done the other, you know, seven hours and 45 minutes outside of that 15 minute meeting a day. They're on their own. They're working on things. Maybe they're chatting, you know, with Slack or your, you know, project management tool. But the point here is, is that it's not a big ask.

6:14You're not like in their face 24 seven. In fact, what I've found is team members actually like it. They like the accountability. They like the camaraderie. They like the fact they have something to look forward to every day and sync up and feel like they're part of a team. We forget as business owners that most people like structure, right? And a meeting, a regular meeting, is structure. Now, if you can't meet every day, that's fine. But find a cadence that makes sense. Maybe it's once at the start of the week, once at the end of the week. Maybe it's three times a week. You know your team. You can try what's best for you.

6:50You can always experiment. You could start by meeting at the start of the week, at the end of the week, and then maybe three times a week, and then say, hey, how about we just do a quick stand-up, a quick meeting every day for 10 minutes? It's called stand-up in the tech world because typically it was in an office and everybody would stand up during these meetings, forcing the meeting not to go too long because everybody's standing on their feet. You're going to have this long and depth discussion and debates. You're going to start sitting down. So the whole point of the stand-up is that, hey, let's keep it short and sweet.

7:20Let's make sure we're on track. If we need to discuss things one-on-one or in groups, we could do that after this meeting, not during the stand-up. Now, I mentioned the round robin during these meetings, these regular meetings that allows people to kind of just quickly say what they worked on yesterday, what they're working on today, if they have any blockers or questions. Another element I like to add to every standup is direction, right? So you should have some sort of dashboard or some sort of metrics or spreadsheet that everybody, the company should be working towards, whether that's revenue, whether that's customers, whether that's retention rates or churn or leads or whatever it might be.

7:54It might be a few different metrics and it might be different for every department. But the point here is, is that I like to end every meeting with just reminding people, hey, this is the goal. Okay. This is what we've done. This is our progress this month. This is what we did last month. This is this month. We're either up or either down. If we're down, we need to do something different. What are we doing about this, guys, to make sure that these numbers are going the right way? We want to make sure people are on track and they understand why they're doing what they're doing. They want to put, you want to put meaning behind the work they're doing every day.

8:21So they understand, okay, I got to get these things done because that's going to lead to more leads or that's going to lead to more sales or that's going to lead to whatever metric we're trying to track and see go up. Another tip, take minutes. Either have your executive assistant take minutes or if you don't have an assistant, you have a small team, do what I did for many, many years. Take turns. Everybody in the meeting will take turns. So say, for example, you have five people in your group or in your team. Every day of that daily standup, somebody is going to take the turn of writing down minutes or writing down notes for that meeting.

8:54And basically what this does is that it holds people accountable. It's in writing, hey, this is what somebody said they're working on yesterday. So they said they're working on today. They have no blockers. Why? Because then you can look at these meeting notes as the manager, as the owner, and say, okay, this person has been working on the same task four days in a row. Do they need help? Are they stuck? What's going on? Why is this taking so long for them to move the needle? Or this person is just plowing through things and getting things done or getting a lot of things done. I don't know how much I appreciate that and how much it's really helping the business.

9:26And maybe I can see some opportunities for them to progress or get promoted. But without any documentation, it's hard for you to really see what's going on or get a good snapshot of some progression throughout the weeks. And there's something about writing it down, putting things down that get people committed, get people focused. So I highly recommend you have minutes, minutes be taken for every single meeting. Now, to wrap up this question from Sandy, if you're looking for an easy tool to use, we're not affiliated. We don't get a commission, but we love Basecamp. We use Basecamp to manage our team.

10:03It's a project management tool. and Basecamp has these built-in meetings you can set up in your calendar. In those meetings, you can take the minutes, you can take the notes and people can know exactly where to go and what time the meeting is every single time they get a notification. So it's very easy for you to organize regular meetings and jot down notes and build projects based on those notes and all kinds of stuff and comments later on. So the conversation can keep going and people can ask questions even after the meeting offline or off the actual video call. This is also applicable if you have a meeting in person with the team.

10:36But Basecamp is super simple and it's super, super good value. It's like an amazing value. It's$99 a month. Doesn't matter how many users you have, how many team members you have. It's still$99 a month. It's pretty crazy. Well, there you have it, Sandy. Thank you so much for asking today's Q &A Wednesday's question. Hey, if you're listening to this episode and you have a question about your business, you're stumped, you need some help with something, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q &A Wednesday. We can keep you anonymous. You can ask me just to use your first name, whatever you like.

11:07Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I always say communication is the mother of all skills. This is why it's so important to communicate, communicate, communicate, whether it's with your team, whether it's with your marketing, whether it's with your sales, your branding, whatever it might be on your website, in your emails. It's very hard to over-communicate. So you're probably going to tend to under-communicate. The more you communicate, the clearer things become to everybody. Sometimes things don't resonate with people the first time or the second time they need to hear over and over frequently often.

11:38Thank you so much for listening to the show. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.