Decent new research out of Northwestern about how, logically, it’s hard to get good ideas and good new processes unless you talk to the employees as well as the executives and consultants, i.e. “top-down directives” don’t work super well. I hope we all somewhat know this by this point, but we keep writing articles about it, so I guess perhaps we do not.
One of the things this article proposes is better daily meetings, i.e. “standups” or whatever you want to call them. For a while in 2019, when I was pretty dire financially in pockets, I worked for this startup called Range, which doubles-down on standups and more effective meetings. As a result, I had to write a lot about that type of stuff. It was always amazing to me how theoretically simple a standup is, and yet most companies don’t even get remotely close to making it work effectively.
A year before I was doing stuff with Range, I worked at this agency in North Texas. It was an interesting place — had a decent client base, but a lot of problems overall. First, it had prided itself for years on being “cool” and “hip” and having parties where people got home at 2-3am. Nice! Problem was: when I worked there, six women were pregnant concurrently. That’s a big culture change happening in real-time, and not everyone was prepared for it. Plus: the main executive, the guy with his name on the door, literally never showed up to the office and was hard to reach. So, there were issues, but overall an OK place. I was a terrible employee there because I never really understood what our goals were and I eventually detached from it all, so I got laid off after about a year.
This place did have a daily standup, and across the year I was there, we tried to reinvent this thing four-five times, and it never seemed to work. First off, generally speaking you had about 25-30 people on this standup, and maybe 6-7 on video (remote employees, people working from home that day). No one seemed to ever grasp the point of the standup, and so it would devolve into “Well, at 1:15 I’m getting sushi with my husband…” We used to have meetings about the morning meeting (ha!), and we’d say “OK, only say stuff that is a blocker to work getting done that day for you, and only address the person who can resolve the block.” Then two days later, some woman would be “I’m trying out this new fencing class at the Y…”
These daily meetings need to be “co-created.” Since that sounds like a buzzword, let me try to define it. I mean that:
- Executives can initially set the tone, purpose, and flow.
- As the meeting evolves, others need to chime in on its usefulness and how to improve it.
- Everyone needs to get on the same page with why this is being done and what people should leave the meeting with.
- There should be a time limit. One of these things at that agency ran 1 hour. That’s overkill.
- Executives need to listen to employees, and employees need to respect what executives are pushing down — at least to a point. We can’t have anarchy (Portland!), but we can’t just take everything a boss man is shoving down our throats if the boss man doesn’t understand how the work gets done.
So yes, and effective morning meeting that level-sets different work issues, challenges, problems, and solutions can be very effective at unifying different compensation levels. But it needs to co-create and evolve with all parties weighing in and discussing the good/bad of it, or else you just created another meeting without much purpose. Don’t we all have a few too many of those on the old calendar blocks as is?
