Luke Thomas – That Meeting Should Have Been An Email

I'm thrilled to welcome Luke Thomas, Founder at Friday. His session is entitled: That meeting should have been an email. People love remote work because of the flexibility that it provides, but it won't happen if you spend your whole day in meetings.

We'll unpack specific strategies to make this more flexible, eliminating the meetings. That should have been an email from the start. Luke, thank you for sharing your genius with us.

Take it away. Everyone, my name is Luke Thomas. I'm the founder of Friday, and we've built tools to make it easy to automate routine communication and updates at work so you can understand what's going on when you're working remotely.

And in today's conversation or in today's talk, I'm going to discuss something you may have heard before when you're in the office, which is, quote, That meeting should have been an email. So let's dig in and talk about what meetings should actually be emails and what meetings should be meetings. So the first thing I'd like to do is kind of set the tone for what I believe the number one benefit of remote work is, which is flexibility.

Its flexibility to work where you want at a time that makes sense for you and the ability to build work around the realities of life. And if you look at data online, they kind of back up this key point, which is that the biggest benefit to working remotely is a flexible schedule. It's a it's the flexibility that it provides.

And so remote work is all about flexibility. The question then is, does is this scenario sound flexible to you, right, you may have seen some of these articles on the interweb, especially with everybody working from home as of late, you know, things like how to overcome Zoom fatigue or how to make sense of all the chat notifications and the noise in your everyday life. And so the question is, is this a flexible working environment or is this a brutal working environment?

Here's the reality work still requires constant presence, even though we've seen this massive shift from the office to remote, we're still running into this issue where we're not really tapping into the major benefit of what makes remote work so great. So here's some examples. This kind of this always on conveyor belt of workplace chat and the fear of missing out.

You leave for a few minutes, you come back and there's a bunch of messages that you need to catch up on. Maybe you spend most of your day in meetings. Some research indicates that the average person spends 10 to 20 percent of their week in meetings.

If you run a team, it could be upwards of 50 percent. So that's a huge portion of your time spent where presence is required to get work done. Nowadays, we're seeing kind of this rise of these virtual office environments, but even those require constant presence there, aim to boost collaboration.

But once again, we're bound to hang out in the same place at the same time. So now let's talk about how to fix this. I believe the most important thing that you can do to create that flexible working environment that makes remote work so great is to reduce your dependency on the real time to get work done.

People need swim lanes for doing their best work. And ideally, you should really be thoughtful about when you communicate in real time and when you communicate asynchronously or in a delayed format. So let's specifically unpack meetings a bit more, so if you kind of zoom in and think about most meetings that you have, especially the routine ones, they kind of consist of two different components.

So oftentimes at the beginning of the meeting, especially once again, these routine meetings, there's this element of information sharing or bringing people up to speed. Oftentimes, it's sharing metrics, basic facts and information and most importantly, status updates. You may have sat in some of these meetings where you go around in a circle and you share one at a time what you're up to.

Then oftentimes in the second half of the meeting, you jump into the more collaborative activities, things like resolving blockers, making decisions, brainstorming around thorny issues. And so the question I have for you is, if you look at this mug, which is a literal product on Amazon, which says I should find another meeting, that should have been an email. The question I have for you all is what part of the meeting do people really dislike?

Is it the collaborative nature or is it the stuff that involves that basic information sharing? I would argue the information sharing if I'm meeting primarily consists of information sharing. It's probably a meeting that people say, well, that could have been an email.

So here's a question I have for you all is what if we just shared the information before the meeting starts? Right. And so then what we could do is we could walk into a meeting and we have a general basic understanding in this foundation for rich discussion and collaboration.

And we spend less time giving status updates and doing the boring stuff. We allocate more time and attention to relationship building, removing those blockers and ambiguity. Turns out this approach actually works.

And so specifically asynchronous communication or written communication has a few different kind of superpowers that real time communication doesn't. The first is you have the ability to edit and revise for clarity. That is something I actually would like right about now is I'm giving this talk.

I'd love to be able to edit and revise this as I go, but I can't. The second piece is that it persists something and can be referenced later, right? Written communication written in stone.

You can reference it later. It can help you resolve the ambiguity long after the meeting occurs. Written communication is also easily swimmable, if you've ever sat in a meeting like I have where you give status updates, oftentimes half of the updates that are given have very little relevance to you in your day.

But sometimes a few things do. If you can skim over the update before the meeting, you can identify the things that you need clarification on. Additionally, it's more inclusive.

People each can kind of write that update before they walk in and you won't be interrupted because you're writing it down beforehand. So once again, the idea here is what if you shared information before the meeting? In theory, if you did this, it would dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend in meetings and help you create a more flexible workplace.

So let's talk about specific playbooks that you can roll out. The first is kind of thinking at a high level, let's think about how we could go about kind of cutting these meetings in half, using a synchronous communication to share the information and the updates beforehand. So the first thing I would recommend is analyze the meeting structure, different routine meetings, have different information that they are the porpoise or the job that they aim to accomplish varies.

So you need to do as you kind of need to think about the meeting itself and say what information like what is the outcome of this routine meeting and how can I create a framework for getting that information asynchronously? The second piece is a lot of people will ask for agenda items before meeting. Well, that's a stepping stone towards a better meeting, I would argue.

It's not it doesn't go as far as it should. The reasoning is because if you had agenda items to a doc, what it essentially is doing is it's allocating a placeholder for bringing up that conversation in a meeting, which is fine. But if it's just information sharing, it creates ambiguity and people have to clarify.

So if you ask a question instead, like, hey, what did you accomplish this week? What are you working on next week? What happens is people respond in prose versus bullet points.

It gives you additional levels of richness. The third thing I recommend is try to automate as much of the process as possible, use tools like Zapier, try to create calendar reminders, use a tool like Friday to help you automate as much as some of the routine update as possible. Because the thing what you're trying to reduce is the amount of human intervention required to get these updates done before the meeting happens.

Additionally, if you can try to get that update delivered an hour before your meeting, so then you can all, as a team, read the updates beforehand, or if you don't think you can pull that off, just allocate the first five minutes to review the written update before you jump into the real time collaborative nature of the meeting. So let's talk about even more specific playbooks so you can roll out right now and we see this across our customer base, so this is something that hundreds of teams are doing. So the first is what we would recommend is some type of Monday morning prioritization.

It's a looking forward event. And so run this on a Monday morning and ask a couple of questions. I'd recommend asking, hey, how was your weekend?

What do you aim to accomplish this week? Here's what happens when people share what they aim to accomplish for the week, helps create a little bit of accountability, sets an expectation, especially for the team leader, on what the output should be at the end of the week and also mixes in a little bit of fun because you can quickly catch up on a co-worker did this really fun activity over the weekend, which can jumpstart those needed conversations. But number two, this is not rocket science, do something like a daily stand up, a lot of teams and companies are doing this now already.

Consider running this Tuesday through Thursday or every day of the workweek. Ask a few questions. Hey, what did you do yesterday?

What are you working on today? Do you have any blockers? Do you have anything else you'd like to share?

That last question in particular is really, really important, because what it does is it gives each person the space to quickly share what's going on in their life. Maybe they have to step out for a little bit. m.

in the afternoon. This helps set expectations, helps you identify potential roadblocks faster, and it helps you feel more connected. I call this kind of the bare minimum amount of presence necessary to feel connected.

The third is some type of recap at the end of the week, so consider doing this Friday morning or afternoon something like, hey, what did you accomplish this week? So it allows the person to look back at the week and share if they hit that goal or not. It's a nice kind of self reflective process.

You can ask how they felt, how productive they were and anything else they'd like to share. Maybe they're out next week. Maybe that needs to be conveyed to the rest of the group.

So this helps create reflection or creates a check point for the accomplishments and for output so that you can create a more results based work environment instead of requiring meetings to figure out if people are living up to what they said they would do. The fourth playbook is some type of one on one meeting. I can't tell you how many times I have led or been in a one on one meeting where the first 15 to 20 minutes of that meeting is spent, where you're trying to figure out what's going on with the employee.

Maybe if you ask a few questions beforehand in an asynchronous format, you can collect this information beforehand. People are more honest behind the screen. Use this to your advantage to kickstart better and more engaging in real time conversations.

So, as I mentioned, there's a few questions here you can ask. On a scale of one to 10, how are you feeling? What's the best part of your week?

What can I help you with? What would you like to discuss? Once again, this is not rocket science.

The fifth and final playbook is for a leader or a CEO. Consider running this at the end of the week or maybe at the beginning of the next week, you know, hey, what emoji would you to describe your week? This helps gauge emotion.

What how are we tracking on key goals or initiatives and what's top of mind? This is kind of a complement to an all hands meeting. And it's a it's a way to help align the team without the need to hold a brittle, real time meeting.

So this is the last slide I'll go through, but once again, just to recap. Meetings are best for collaboration, relationship building and removing ambiguity if you are just using a meeting to share information, that is probably a meeting that could have been an email or an asynchronous update. And now the hope my hope here with this matrix is to help give you a basic framework for thinking about when you should have a meeting, for when you should use a different communication channel for the task at hand.

So the first question is, what is my working relationship with the person or the people that I am thinking about meeting with? Is it strong or weak? Do I know this person?

Do I not? The second factor is the type of conversation is this kind of this very clear, low ambiguity topic, or is it a very collaborative thing where there's a lot of moving pieces that need to be resolved? Well, here's how I think about it.

If the working relationship is weak and if the conversation is somewhat unclear or ambiguous, you should probably have a real time meeting for that, save your real time conversations for when they fit that mold. Now, if you have a strong working relationship, if you get to know the people and it's a little bit unclear, maybe consider using a tool like Zoom where you are able to express yourself over video but in an asynchronous format. If you have a clear conversation type thing, updates, facts, information, and you have a weak tie with the individual, consider using email, but maybe consider using slang instead.

e. facts and information once again and you have a strong relationship with your team. Consider using something like a Wiki or Friday to help you share those updates asynchronously.

If you do this, you will spend a lot less time in meetings. The meetings that you have will be meetings that should really exist and then you can build a more flexible workplace. So I hope this makes sense.

app or you can send me a note on Twitter. I hope this is useful and I hope you have better meetings and I hope you have a wonderful time working remotely. Thanks.