The Staff Meeting Ritual

Ah, the dreaded staff meeting.

Chances are, if you work for a company of a certain size, you’ll have been pulled into a staff meeting at some point. I’m not talking so much about the scrum meetings that follow some part of Agile methodology—at least those have blueprints that participants follow—but regular meetings set up by a director, VP, or executive that share high-level updates across teams, departments, and organizations.

Everybody invited dutifully attends—after all, their boss is the one hosting—but I’ve found that across teams and companies, the general shape of these meetings often ends up a series of 1-to-1 conversations. That is: someone like the CEO wants updates across their senior leadership team, they set up something early in the week to lay out the rest of it, and inevitably every participant provides updates for their team and areas of ownership, with the CEO-host riffing on the news and giving real-time feedback. In the context of a private 1:1, this is a good use of time; the value is more dubious when a dozen attendees are waiting their turn or space out after their allotted time passes. The meeting becomes a lengthy standup, yet somehow removed from the shortening forcing function of physically standing up.

I approach my staff meetings differently. I generally prefer getting my status updates either at the start of my 1:1s, or asynchronously via Slack or project and team summaries. I still hold staff meetings, but instead focus the time on team-building and group problem-solving, with me acting as the host to kickstart conversations. I started this ritual about 7–8 years ago when I first started managing managers and wanted a better format for bringing together the more senior, busier, more expensive people on my teams. Across teams and companies, I’ve iterated on the meeting, modifying the format to accommodate my team’s suggestions and what I saw were the gaps in our organization.

Here’s the current take:

• Schedule on a Tuesday or Wednesday, in a neutral timezone. There are too many holidays on Mondays1, but there’s value in keeping it early in the week, for there to be time to address any action items falling out from the meeting.
• Start with an icebreaker question for the group. Now, these are usually reserved for group offsites or networking events, so I’ve evolved this exercise to be a series of questions that lets the team get to know each other better—an aspect of team formation that is otherwise hard to get, particularly with distributed teams meeting primarily through video chat. It’s also an excuse to make everyone talk at least once; it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll raise their hands later on, but I figure every bit helps. This part of the meeting often starts slow and seems to take too much time, but I find that after 3–4 times people start getting into a rhythm and we power through nicely2.
• Keep an agenda doc, but keep it open and encourage your team to add to it. Instead of having just the host set the agenda or defaulting to round-robin updates, I encourage folks to bring issues to the table for broader discussion, and/or information dissemination throughout the week. I’ve found this works best with managers and senior engineers with a finer, honed sense of collaboration; some engineers just don’t like to bring up topics for discussion. My goal for this part of the meeting is to have the agenda driven by the team, with me periodically relaying important top-down information.
• Take notes! It’s easier now with AI notetakers, but even with that tool I often volunteer myself anyway. It’s quite hard to talk and take notes at the same time, so I use it as a mechanism to force myself to shut up and let others chime in. A side benefit is that I’m taking the job that quiet ones in the group often retreat towards; their silence becomes all the more obvious when there’s no other activity that they could be doing in the meeting instead. Be measured in creating follow-up action items and discussions. I’ve found that team meeting discussions can be very valuable in capturing a wide range of perspectives, but there’s also usually a point of diminishing returns when 2–3 people rabbit hole into a corner3.
• I’ve tried a few different ways to assign action items; some teams are very diligent about following through and coming back the next week with next steps, while other teams need consistent reminders at the start of every staff meeting, culminating in a parade of little shame emojis 😳 marking each week’s truancy.

And that’s it! The overall process isn’t particularly complicated or lengthy, but the simplicity here is by design and took many iterations, throwing away ideas that didn’t work for the team or didn’t produce the desired results.

But the most important part of this staff meeting ritual is keeping the cadence, as much as possible. The format is straightforward enough that I’ve often asked senior team members to run the meeting for me when I’m on vacation or unavailable at that timeslot. In a couple of instances, the team establishes a rhythm with the staff meeting, making it all the more valuable to maintain the space for collaboration.