[Ted ChoperModerator]

Do you have regular team meetings? What about one-to-ones?

I was doing a bi-weekly team meeting, which is especially important because everyone I manage works in our remote office. But I realized that there was no “official” and scheduled time for one-to-one interactions. I recently decided to rotate - a meeting each week, alternating among individual and team chats. This seems to work really well.

What is the format of your meetings? What is discussed?

[Daniel SlaterParticipant]

We borrowed a page from AGILE development cycles and have a daily morning standup with the entire company. It basically runs like this:

1. Lead-off topic - this is something big that’s happened that the company needs to know about, like an official product release, new development milestone or something along those lines.
2. 3 Up, 3 Down - each member of the team gives up to three things they worked on the day before, three things they are planning on working on today, and if they are waiting on anyone else in order to get those things done.
3. Follow-up - this is basically the Q & A session, where people who want to get more information from another member can do so.
4. Break! - I wish everyone a good day at work and they Go Fast And Break Things (kind of a company motto).

We’re at fifteen-ish employees right now, and the meeting takes around 15 minutes. As we continue to grow it will most likely break into smaller team meetings, with the team leaders meeting afterward to coordinate, but for right now that’s our main scheduled meeting.

I also have a monthly 1 on 1 meeting with our Director of Marketing (officially our customer service and community management are part of the marketing department), and we have bi-weekly meetings to pitch ideas to dev team to improve our products.

[Chase ClemonsParticipant]

We don’t have any regularly scheduled team meetings. Communicating in Basecamp takes care of those conversations. Plus it’s hard to have a recurring meeting since we’re all in different timezones.

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

We gotta get @Aaron in this thread…I sat in on one of his team meetings once and it was great. Would also love to hear from @MichaelSchade & @jon, since they run very different teams.

I do a monday morning check-in, but also inherited a bi-monthly team scrum and weekly 1:1’s with each team member. The scrum covers big discussions (“We’re revamping our custom fields, what do we want them to be?”), the 1:1’s cover individual employee’s frustrations, shortcomings, projects, etc. I’m not a huge fan of meetings but I’m actually happy with all of these…they cover the gamut and keep communication going even on weeks when I’m in meetings and documents all day!

[Evan HamiltonParticipant]

@jon, even.

[Jon MeyerParticipant]

Hey Hey!

I have a team of 4 which includes a content expert, knowledge admin, and two social media tepresentitives.

I have 1:1 meetings biweekly and a weekly team meeting. I run them all the same: hot or new topics, dive into my agenda updating the team, cascade info etc, another request for new topics on or off topic, and they want to, just talk about the weather, life, etc for the remainder.

My approach is I am equally their supervisor and representitive for them to the execs to do their jobs the best they can as long as they can prove the business case.

 

 

 

 

 

[Aaron WheelerParticipant]

Great question! We’ve tried a lot of formats but have settled on half-hour weekly 1:1s between me and each team member, and one 15-minute standup meeting across the team once/week.

Before the 1:1s, I ask each team member to complete a 15Five.com report; check ‘em out. It documents the conversation and helps people think about their workload. Since 80% of every helpster’s week is tickets, there’s generally only slow progress on projects, which is harder to track. In the 1:1s we’ll follow up on the 15Five and ask:

- What’s your happiness level on a scale of 1-10?

- What’s an accomplishment from the past week?

- What’s a challenge?

- What feedback do you have for me or something you’d change?

At the standups we use a whiteboard to track longer-term projects and talk about what we did the past week and what we’re doing this week. I’ll also bring up announcements, get the team in sync, brainstorm, etc. They’re pretty good since it can be hard to pull away from all-tickets-all-the-time mentality.

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