Most companies use team meetings to keep tabs on how things are going in the business…but how EXACTLY should you structure these meetings? What should your workflow look like?
In this (recorded) Live from the Facebook Group I’m talking through the qualities of a meeting workflow in ClickUp (timing, method, agenda, etc.) and thinking through how I’m trying to improve my own team meetings one piece at a time.
You’ll notice how I approach this differently because of the fact that I use ClickUp for my Team Meetings and Agendas — particularly for the “asynchronous scrum” I mention throughout the video. Check out my videos on Dashboards to learn more about what that looks like!
Want to try ClickUp for yourself? Use my affiliate link here.
Table of Contents:
00:00 – What are Meeting Workflows?
1:43 – Meetings aren’t necessary information transfer.
3:18 – Warning signs of “information meetings”
4:20 – Primary pieces of structuring a meeting: Timing (or Rhythm), Agenda, Policy
5:46 – Meetings for teams using technology are different!
6:38 – Asynchronous meetings are via Voxer, ClickUp, texting, etc.
7:00 – Synchronous are traditional meetings via in-person, Zoom, or phone.
7:50 – There are now 4 pieces of how we structure meetings.
8:30 – How I structure Meetings now (imperfectly!)
8:50 – My Weekly Huddle (Zoom)
9:33 – My Weekly Check-in using ClickUp Chat
13:50 – Intuitive process improvement
16:34 – Researching process improvement on Google
22:50 – Considering the Scaling Up Meeting Structure
24:00 – What change am I going to try?
Related Resources
➤ You can watch more Workflow Wednesdays on this playlist!
➤ How to Use ClickUp for Meeting Agendas w/ Dashboard, Doc or Tasks
Video Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript from this video. Please be mindful that this transcript may not be 100% accurate.
We’re going to talk about meetings, because this is something that I am trying
to puzzle out for myself, and it’s also one of those back office
kind of ongoing workflows in our business that we
don’t often have conversations about.
So, first of all, let me just define what a meeting workflow is to me.
Your workflow. Let’s start there.
Your workflow is the way you do things.
And meetings are a thing that many businesses need to do in some way,
shape or form.
And the purpose of talking today is to take the meeting habits.
You might have be intentional about them, think about them and define them
in a workflow, which usually to me just means a visual representation
of how you do things. It could be a flowchart, it could be something else today.
It can be something else.
And once you have it out on paper, we can actually look at it, examine it and understand how exactly does that meeting workflow serve or not serve
the goals we have for that meeting?
This approach obviously works for any part of business, whether you’re talking about service, design or billing or even how you do vacation time.
Everything has a workflow.
And so today I want to do something kind of basic and back office to demonstrate how this workflow thinking canapply all over the business.
Today, I’m going to go through the normal process.
I would well, I am going through to figure this out for my own business.
So I would really welcome any insights, opinions or thoughts that you guys have, because this is not something I have figured out I am bringing this year because I am actively trying to work on this.
It’s going to be going through the process of first just kind of talking about what this is, talking about my status quo going through what I would go through, which is maybe doing a little bit of research and then making a change and testing it and seeing how it works.
So here we are. We’ve got our meetings.
And I’m just going to scroll down here and talk about why this is becoming
a priority for me. So one of the kind of certain things that you just hear and you’re like, that’s bad.
You just know that’s not the way things should be going.
Using meetings for information transfer is one of those things that’s just it’s bad.
It’s outdated.
It’s not the best use of human meeting time.
And I had a client this week who actually started talking about their meetings and he was kind of explaining something along the lines of they get together.They have the very old school meeting of where they sit around and they justkind of give status updates of what’s on their calendar.
Meanwhile, they all have shared calendars so they can actually look at this
much quicker by just peeking into each
other’s calendars versus spending some
time just discussing everybody’s schedule
verbally in a 15 to hour long meeting.
I have other clients right now who are
in a very meeting, intensive culture.
And so the topic of meetings
has come up a lot.
And today, what I want to talk about
with you today, what I want to talk about
is my own meeting culture and how I can
make it better, serve the intent
that I have for meetings.
In my opinion, meetings are not supposed
to be about information transfer.
It’s about pulling human beings together
to do something that human
brains are needed to do.
This information transfer is something
that can be done through technology,
and I think it can probably done more
effectively and more
efficiently through technology.
I would much rather just look at someone’s
calendar than spend 50 minutes every
morning having them read it to me.
So, yeah, the information
transfer came to my attention.
I was like, all right,
this is something I need to work
on because I’ve noticed
that in our meetings here.
And I’ll tell you what my structure
is and why I’m not so happy with it.
I’ve noticed that we’ve skewed
into that information transfer.
You can tell this when you hear people
listing off things,
they’re scrolling through notifications or
they’re opening their email
in order to speak in the meeting.
That’s kind of your red flags that you’re
starting to have a information centric
meeting and therefore probably not using
your people’s time to the
best or the fullest way.
I’d rather use that brainpower than just
have people read off their schedule.
That’s supposed to be brain
doesn’t really look like it.
All right.
We’re going to keep going.
So what are the kind of different
mechanisms involved in a meeting
to start with this?
The three basic pieces, which I mean, if
I have the book behind me here, I do not.
It’s somewhere around here.
I have a few books recently that they’re
older, books that I’m reading them
and they have a lot of good
stuff around SystemUp.
That’s part of what’s so fun of being
a young entrepreneur or working
in a space like business systems.
Because business systems are ancient,
they’ve been around as
long as businesses have.
And so the stuff that we’re
learning isn’t exactly new.
It’s just repurposing old stuff.
So reading these old books,
their information or their approach
to meetings is very different.
For them, information sharing was actually
necessary because there wasn’t as much
of a digital infrastructure
today that’s changed.
But some of the things about
meetings have stayed the same.
And some of those essential pieces
are what I’m going to draw out here,
timing or consistency.
That’s kind of the first piece
of the meeting puzzle,
whether you’re looking way,
way back or even just to what
modern business practices are.
Is it weekly?
Is it monthly?
Is it an hour long?
Is it half hour long
timing and kind of pace?
I’m going to group those together.
Is your first piece of the meeting puzzle?
The other piece is kind of an agenda or
what do you talk about
during those meetings?
How do you decide when
the meeting is done?
Kind of the start stop and the stuff
in between that agenda piece has always
been a part of modern meetings or sorry,
not even modernity’s any meetings.
And the final piece is.
I’m just going to call policy,
for lack of a better word,
but this is kind of like your rules
and expectations for the meeting, simple
things like show up, that’s a good rule.
Maybe you might see some practices
that say identify issues,
don’t try to solve the issues.
Each kind of approach to meeting
has a different policy approach.
But when you combine those three pieces,
you really can build out by pulling
the levers in different ways.
You can build out any book talking about
meeting rhythms, using these three pieces,
at least as far as I found so far.
So we change the timing to be
more frequent or less frequent.
The agenda to be this or that.
We can start building out all these
business frameworks from the gurus,
whether they’re of old or recently.
But technology, as I alluded to already,
has changed this a little bit.
The need to share
information has lessened.
And so in these older books that we’re
reading, we really need to take
that for granted with a grain of salt
around what they include in their agenda.
Because a lot of older businesses,
information sharing was a huge piece
of the agenda, whether that’s putting it
on the whiteboard or
verbally talking through it.
So the main change,
the main other variable that new
businesses have to think about when it
comes to meeting is Synchronoss
versus asynchronous.
And this is kind of where I just want
to lay this landscape,
because this is where I’ve
started to have a little bit of
thinking about where I’m kind of puzzled
about how to best do this,
because a lot of the books,
because they are not used to working
in an asynchronous environment,
they don’t really know.
They don’t give you a lot
of guidance around this.
Right.
We can look to the gurus or
the accomplished entrepreneurs
of old to find a lot of good wisdom.
But when it comes to new technology
and how to apply it in a way that’s still
human, we’re going
to need a pioneer of it.
So let me first explain
what the difference is.
So asynchronous is the idea that’s over
here on the left side,
if I can get my great
asynchronous is kind of what we’re used
to when it comes to most
communication today.
That is an ugly gray.
That’s the one I wanted.
Asynchronous suggest that you are sending
in messages and someone else will
see them when they see them.
This is including things like Voxer,
social media, email,
all of that stuff is asynchronous because
you should shoot out that message whenever
you think of it and when
the person gets it great.
On the other hand, synchronous is the more
traditional approach to meetings
or really any communication.
You have people in the same room at the
same time and they talk about something.
You call someone up,
they have to answer in that moment.
And you talk about something, obviously
there’s a little bit in between.
Like maybe you could ping someone
to say, let’s jump on a call.
But more or less, those are
the two categories today.
And previously we were all living in kind
of a synchronous communication environment
in business and personal life.
We’ve increasingly moved over
to asynchronous texting.
We’re really flying up there.
Texting, replaced phone
calls for many people.
Voice mail become the new phone call.
Voxer replaces phone calls,
video recordings like Loom replace
video calls like FaceTime.
We’ve kind of shifted more and more
into an asynchronous world.
And there are people who are
pushed back to that.
But nonetheless, we’ve introduced
another variable into our now four part
four pieces of levers that we can
use to design our meeting workflow.
So timing, such peace agenda,
the policies and rules we have and then
not really sure
what’s a good word for this category.
I would just say, like,
ah, is everyone in sync or not in sync?
Is it all at the same time or
is it not in the same time?
Do we all have to be there
at the same moment or not?
Hint, if you have people in different time
zones, most likely going to be
leaning towards the asynchronous way.
So let’s just pop up here and talk about
what I’m currently doing and
why I’m maybe not the happiest with it.
So in terms of these three main categories
and I will add the actual sink in here.
Let’s go ahead and make this sink.
OK, so all of these ones that are here
right now, my team is using two different
types of recurring meetings and it’s
actually kind of that
that there’s only two.
That’s one of the things I’m
dissatisfied with.
So we have a Tuesday meeting.
Which has a set agenda of kind
of like what’s coming up?
I know that sounds very
information oriented.
I actually let’s see what I have in here.
I have a schedule.
Schedule of week,
terms of client work, Hoopes.
Schedule of week and goals and priorities
like what you’re working on, basically
priorities and then road bumps,
that’s what that schedule is.
This is a we say it’s a 30 minute meeting,
sometimes it gets longer,
we don’t even have many people.
So that’s kind of shocking
to say for 30 minutes.
Our policies are none.
We have no policies around what needs
to happen during that meeting
and Synchronizer.
And I think that is Cinq.
We are all doing that at
the same time on ZOM.
The other meeting that I currently have
in my workflow is a Thursday meeting.
So this is Thursday.
This is like five minutes, I’d say,
let’s say 15, because
I need to read things.
This is an asynchronous meeting.
And I actually use a ClickUp chat
for that put chat,
which is in a ClickUp dashboard.
That’s for our team meetings.
It’s called our Status Quo Update.
So we actually have a pretty good template
for that, which, of course,
I don’t have up on my screen.
But I’ll pop it up here to show you.
I think I probably showed you before.
I think it’s something
like how are you feeling?
That’s fine.
I’ll just I’ll just lift it off.
So generally, I’m feeling is
the first prompt since last update.
The last update.
You give kind of a thing on what you
have accomplished since the last update.
By the next update.
I will.
And this is a text template that we copy
and paste into a chat widget to give our
updates with timestamps,
so this is a dashboard that we’ve filled
out in ClickUp and road blocks again is
the question, what’s getting in your way?
So the four parts to that,
any policies are rules around that,
that we actually have pretty good rules
rule around in the sense
that we have a full template.
So they just copy in place
and fill in the blanks.
Madlib style for how are you feeling?
All that stuff.
It’s all right there.
So terms of the rules for that one.
I feel like we’ve got a little
bit of a stronger system now.
What levers what am I not
happy about in this workflow?
Because this is what I have currently and
I feel like there’s some stuff missing.
Some of the things I think are missing
for me is that I think there are not
enough policies around
the Tuesday meeting.
And I also think it ends up being very
information transfer by accident.
I think this is just an evolution of we’ve
gotten comfortable, we’ve gotten
into a rhythm and we started to get lax.
And actually following our own agenda,
we’re not we’re honestly
rarely following this agenda.
We’re doing a lot of catchup time,
which is not bad in any way, but maybe
isn’t the best use of the meeting time.
So the fact that there’s information
transfer is something that I want
to solve for that’s like my ex.
I’m trying to software in this equation
and I think the policy gap
might be a way to do this.
I’m also not super thrilled with how long
these meetings take because of the fact
that they’re either too short or too long.
We’ve got a really small team to take 30
minutes just to do this piece to me feels
either, you know, it’s too long for just
a quick check in, but it’s too
short to actually discuss anything.
So I want to.
Think about what pacing makes the most
sense, especially as on right now,
that’s a good shameless plug here.
I’m hiring another HVA here,
so if you are ten ninety nine US based to
who is good at some data entry
and some marketing stuff, let me know.
But as we’re bringing on someone else,
I want to have this really locked down
for that person to kind of smoothly fall
in to one or both of these meetings.
All right.
So that zoom zoom is fine.
I think one thing that I also not super
happy with, which is something I’ve
recommended to clients, and I really
want to make sure I’m also applying.
What I’m recommending is we don’t have any
real record of what we talk
about in this meeting.
So that’s probably ties into the either
the policies or the agenda.
But I love how the Thursday asynchronous
check and we can scroll through and see
each other’s updates for the past months
through the chat widget
that are all timestamps.
But with these synchronous meetings,
not only do we get off topic,
but we don’t always know what
we talked about the last week.
So that’s something I really
want to work on as well.
So that is I think that’s about where I’m
at the status quo on my own
internal meetings.
I also would be really interested
in looking at kind of a different
kind of huddle sorry lefthanded.
It really makes this whiteboard scenario
kind of finicky,
adding an additional recurring meeting.
So maybe it’s monthly for content
planning, maybe its quarterly
for strategic goals.
A lot of those things right now I have
for myself and a repeating schedule.
But you guys, when I have a meeting just
with myself, I am far more likely to put
it off, delay it,
squeeze it into a weekend by accident,
because I want to focus on something
during the week or getting
that extra client call.
So I’m wondering if maybe I could bring
out some of those other planning style
meetings and incorporate other people
into them and have this agenda and stuff
for maybe monthly or quarterly stuff.
So that is that a status quo?
If you are just joining us,
we are talking about before I look
forward, we are talking about meeting
workflows or meeting processes
and trying to improve it.
Personally, I’m just working on mine.
I do not have any solutions today.
I would just love to hear your insights.
I’m just going to give you a live look
at how I try to improve these things when
I don’t have necessarily the idea
of what’s going to be the right solution.
So when I start identifying the things I
don’t like about a process,
my next move is to move into like
an intuitive stage is to imagine,
you know, what do I think knowing nothing?
What do I think I could
do to make this better?
And I already talked about some of that,
adding, I need to firm up my agenda.
Firm agenda for those weeklies
for the Synchronoss Weekly’s.
I might want to consider
giving some other time we’re extending it
even to have time dedicated for just the
catch up time, I know that’s important.
I just don’t know where that needs to go
because we are humans who need to catch
up and just see how things are going.
What else is my intuitive
sense about this?
I think that there is an important place
for having Zoome discussions as much as
it’s way more efficient
to have asynchronous meetings.
My intuition is telling.
I probably should keep doing Zoome ones.
Yeah, so I’m going to keep doing that.
The other thing that’s coming up for me,
which I already just mentioned,
is that I could probably pull in more team
members to the planning stuff
that I’m doing with myself.
I’ll just do that.
Other meetings.
And one other thing,
while I’m sitting here.
At one of the things I’m sure
there’ll be a few other things.
Another thing that I’m thinking about is
that perhaps it could be good
to have some one on one time.
I think sometimes our meetings get
filled up with a lot of stuff because
maybe we need to talk about something
that’s personal to one person.
It might be good to have a space for those
things to be taken offline and use
just the people who are relevant to it.
Time.
So one on one meetings or one on one ways
to communicate,
maybe some more of that would be good.
What else do I think if any of you guys
are watching here and you have pieces
of your meeting work that you
find really, really works?
I would love to hear it.
I’m going to just put one last
thing and I’ll move on here.
Issue identification is something that I
try to do a pretty not to say militant,
but very honest job when it
comes to client sessions.
Because we have tight timelines,
we would make sure we accomplish things.
So when topic come up,
we’re really focused on identifying them,
listing them somewhere and then moving
on for the meeting,
not necessarily solving them
sometimes with these synchronous huddles,
because it’s our time to catch up,
we sometimes get into solving
while we’re identifying.
So I think that is a issue id getting
better at facilitating that is something
that I can definitely do
or should be doing.
So intuition is great as we know,
just thinking about things and saying, oh,
I wonder if that can be a nice way to kind
of kick off things because you’re starting
from a place of soul, you’re starting
from a place of your own thinking.
You’re starting without bias of what gurus
or other thought leaders are saying,
but you only know so much and you’re only
aware of the things that you’re aware of.
So you don’t know what you don’t know.
So the next stage of whenever I’m trying
to plan a workflow for something I don’t
know anything really about is
to go to the research phase.
So I did a little bit
of prep for this live.
If this is helpful to you, let me know.
I’m trying to walk you through exactly
what my process looks like to help
you maybe walk through this as well.
And if this is different than what
you would do, please tell me.
Like I said, I’m still
trying to solve this.
So your insights would be appreciated.
When I’m trying to research something,
I start at my girlfriend Google.
When it’s templates or recipes related,
I’m usually looking for
PDF in the actual search results.
That way I’m seeing something
that I can actually see.
The physical thing I’m not interested in.
Sorry, I’m not usually interested
in mindset, pieces or theories.
I’d like to see like the tangible outputs
and judge that rather than
the hype that goes around it.
So I’m usually doing a search with PDF in
it and then I’m just kind of scrolling.
I’m going through all the results to see
what do we have here.
And as I find things that are interesting,
I just kind of consume it all.
I don’t do a lot
of recordkeeping at this phase.
You certainly could if
this is a big initiative.
But for something like a meeting agenda,
I’m just consuming, consuming,
consuming and saving things as I go
that I think are interesting here.
You’ll see it just pulls I’m hopefully
this isn’t copyright infringement cause
I’m just screenshot here what I
found a Google Google Images.
So this is a source from whoever Infinity
is and it goes through
a daily scrum meeting.
So sometimes if I’m working on something
that I know there’s thought leadership on,
it might look for daily meeting scrum
because I know Scrum has a daily meeting
that they prescribe and I might look
at their what I see is their policies.
OK, these look pretty interesting,
I think I have most of these already
downs, I’m already kind of following what
they’re saying,
except for this last one where it’s
the three questions,
move my white board around.
So this is interesting to me to look
at what they’re three questions are,
what did you do yesterday?
What will I do today and what’s in my way?
I think this is great, but for me,
this seems kind of information
like these three pieces.
I could just look, I’m using ClickUp in my
Workspace many of you probably are, too.
These questions are information based
that I could just see looking at someone’s
lineup or what work they did in the past.
What’s in my way is very similar
to the roadblock block question I
already have in my asynchronous from.
So I’m not I’m not learning
a whole lot from this one.
But again, I think this might be one
of those moments where
not to say that this predates technology,
but maybe they’re just not working
in a system like ClickUp so that these
questions are necessary in the way
that they are not for me.
So let’s just keep looking
at what else we have.
EOC, all right.
I don’t know if any of you are US
companies, but I’ve been it seems like
us is like the thing now for my clients.
Were you with a lot of US companies right
now and this is the US Level Ten meeting.
I know about this just
because I’ve heard about it.
This is their prescription.
And us I don’t know who does your graphic
design on your worksheets are ugly.
I hope that person’s not in here.
If it is, I’m sorry.
So this is the agenda that they use for
their level ten meetings, which is there.
I believe these are their weekly meetings,
weekly huddles with each team.
Yep.
And this is the structure that they use.
Now, I’ll notice here that I believe
these are hour and a half meetings.
Yep.
There’s my map.
I want to have meetings.
They have kind of the opening kind
of banter time scorecard based on KPIs.
The rock review, which I know already,
is they’re quarterly themes or
whatever you want to call them.
They’re the big things
that they’re working towards.
Headlines from kind of wins
on the customer or employee side to do
list ID’s of issues and then conclusion.
What I like about this is that they’re
adding in some elements that I haven’t
maybe thought of,
like customer and employee headlines,
I’m curious what that might sound like.
And I could dig in a little bit
deeper into the research to hear.
I know there’s tons of blog posts by US
coaches who would tell
me what that includes.
Rock reviews.
Interesting to tie everything back
to the quarterly theme actually
used to do this in my meetings.
And it’s something that maybe I could
bring back because we do have kind
of sprints that we’re
working on at one time.
But again, we can just
look at that and ClickUp.
So maybe this isn’t I’m
going to cross it out.
I probably don’t need that scorecard KPIs.
That could be interesting.
Right now I have most of the measurements
that are being done in my business.
I am measuring.
But if I was delegating more
of the measurement and they brought those
as a topic during each meeting,
even though it is information,
it might give some more accountability
about collecting that data could
be interesting and banter.
That’s great to do lists
and identification of issues
to do list I definitely don’t care about
because we can already do
that at any moment from ClickUp.
But identifying issues
that could be interesting.
So what I’m doing right now in this
research phase is just pulling
out things that I know work.
If you are doing this part of your
business where you have in-house experts,
this research phase is going
to be more like a conversation.
You might just buy someone coffee and they
will rattle off what they know works.
In this case, I am working in a vacuum,
so I’m going to my friend
Google as my smy on this topic.
So conclusion wrap recap to do list
cascading messages.
I forget what that means.
I used to know what that means.
I do not know if you already lost person
and you know what cascading messages does
leave it in the comments so I don’t have
to go look it up and rating the meeting.
I think rating the meeting
is a little bit.
Yeah, that’s not my style,
so I’m really going get rid of that,
I’m going to recapitalise,
I’ll get rid of that.
I might look into whatever this is.
So, yeah, I don’t know.
Some pieces there that are interesting.
Let’s just keep going through here.
Who else do we have here?
Whoever vast conferences.
Thank you for this red bean
and whatever that is, we huddle agenda.
Here’s another idea.
Shout outs for notable achievements.
Cool.
So we’re seeing the same theme as what we
just saw in us of kind
of acknowledging wins.
Then this is what made
me pull the screenshot.
Actually, I thought this was a really
interesting piece exemplify
company core values.
I have never thought of doing this.
I haven’t seen this in media and the other
of the pieces of IP that I’ve pulled here.
So this to me is something I definitely
want to keep an eye on, having some
kind of call out back to core values.
The things that we measure we have now.
I’m going to butcher the quote,
the things that we actually keep
an eye on and measure grow.
But I can’t remember there’s much
catchier phrase for it, if you know that.
Go ahead, leave it in the comments.
But basically, if we’re if we’re talking
about something,
if we’re focusing on something,
if we’re keeping our eye on it,
that’s what’s going to improve.
And so if core values is something I’m
really trying to instill as the team
grows, this can be a really
creative way to do that.
And top priorities for the day.
Again, same thing as before.
I have ClickUp maybe something would be
more effective for me would be to just
look at having a policy around lineup
rather than any of these things where
they’re like, what are
you working on today?
Maybe we can just say by the team meeting,
have your lineup set up or whatever it is
people are using to manage their agenda,
line up policy.
Again, leveraging the tools I have rather
than having to spend more time
talking about what we are each doing.
All right.
Last thing I want to go into scaling up,
because I know that they
always have great content.
So whenever I’m trying to figure out
something and how it could work at that,
as I scale up my tiny little business
to a slightly less tiny business,
scaling up is always
a resource that I like to use.
So shout out to them, you guys rock.
So here’s what they suggest
as their daily huddle.
Now, some of these were weekly.
This one’s daily.
I’m just pulling the best
of the best year they have.
The six part suggestioninclude timing.
Put it in a good setting.
Stand up I thought was a good point.
Who attends?
Make sure it’s small frequency timing.
We’ve talked about that already.
Who runs meeting agenda?
This is the part that I
really was interested in.
What’s up?
Basically, what’s going on?
What are the daily metrics
and where are you stuck now?
For me, these questions got the closest
to something that I actually do know.
This seems like the less the least
informational questions of any of these
templates that I’ve already seen.
And so to me, this is pretty
much a daily metrics that to me
is very interesting.
And where are you stuck is very direct.
So I think these are some of the questions
I’m going to pull on the heaviest
and combine all these ones that I’ve
shouted out to already into what is
going to become our meeting agenda.
And remember, I’m pulling
all this information.
I’ve got two places to go with it.
It can either be on my first meeting
of the day if I want to keep your two per
week, my first meeting of the week or
my second meeting of the week, either way,
I won’t be pulling the stuff and then
spreading it out into those two meetings.
Right now, I’m taking as an assumption
that I’m going to continue having two
meetings for week one synchronous,
one asynchronous.
Maybe that’ll change.
But as of right now, I only want
to mess with one thing at a time.
So I think agenda and policy
kind of hand in hand there are the two
things I’m going to mess with.
So on to the try phase.
The trial phase is where we actually start
trying to change things
about our workflows.
And this is where I find that people get
really trigger happy and they start
trying to get into it far too soon
or they try to completely overhaul things,
which I’m also guilty of.
So if you’re that way,
don’t worry about it.
But when we’re talking about workflows
like client services or that kind
of stuff, it can be really tempting
to just completely just dump the entire
box out on the floor and say,
we don’t want any of this stuff.
Just throw all the pieces out and start
over, just like with fine tuning services,
just like with pretty much anything
that we do,
starting from scratch is rarely the best
way to go because we’d be much better
served by making one change and seeing
what happens, then trying to change
everything and have no idea what actually
what actually resulted
in the change, if anything.
So here’s our box dump and stuff out.
What I’m going to try to start
implementing this is to take all
that stuff I just researched.
And the first thing I’m
going to try is to change.
I’m going to lead constant.
Let’s go back to this, actually
flip it across the screen.
We’re going on a ride.
All right.
Here we are.
At this point, I’m going to keep timing
and pace constant,
I’m going to keep the same schedule
of meetings, I’m going to keep the same
style of meetings down here,
Synchronoss asynchronous.
I’m going to keep all that fixed.
And I’m going to adjust the agenda
and the policies, which I know
is two things for this week.
I’m going to try doing that for next
week and see what happens.
I’m going to pull from the research.
I’m going to zoom way out here just
to give us a sense of all
the stuff that I looked at.
I’m going to pull all of those areas
that I started kind of pull it
into probably one ClickUp note,
filter down the ones I want and then throw
in the new agenda for our weekly meetings.
And I’m going to try it first
on the synchronous meetings,
because those are the ones that I
feel a little funnier about.
I’m going to try first
manipulating the agenda.
And if that seems to help,
I’m going to probably keep going
in that direction, keep that and maybe
pivot some other things.
If the agenda doesn’t seem to be doing
anything in the workflow and it doesn’t
solve these initial issues that I
identified here, then I might try
pulling some other levers around timing.
But the idea here around modifying this
workflow, just like any workflow,
is to make a little change
and see what happens.
There are so many variables when it comes
to meetings because there’s humans
involved as well as technology as well as
cultural pieces, that it could be
a bit of a thing to experiment on.
But yeah,
so technology wise,
what I’m gonna be doing is just taking
this, collecting it,
using a ClickUp notebook or something like
that and just jotting down my agenda,
I will then put that agenda into the body
of either a Google Calendar invitation
since we use Google Calendar here,
or I’ll put it into a ClickUp doc and link
that doc within the calendar
imitation and I’m just gonna try it.
I’m not going to have
a good way to measure this.
I think it’s probably
gonna be qualitative.
I’m not going to do any
real data collection.
I’m just going to have a conversation
about it and see if that works.
But this is how just to wrap it up here,
some messing with my meeting workflow.
So if you guys have any thoughts about
this, if you have a meeting workflow
that you enjoy,
I would love for you to share it
in comments below,
just like everything else.
Your questions or your answers
to the questions to answer just answers or
questions are appreciated here,
because I don’t know the solution to this,
but I want to let you know how I’m
approaching it, just like you could
approach any other part of your business.
If you are tired of trying to piece
together YouTube videos to figure out how
to align your workflows,
your processes and your ClickUp account.
Well, maybe it’s time that we talk.
I work one on one with a select group
of clients every quarter to help people
build out their systems and processes.
Find out more at ProcessDriven.co.
ProcessDriven helps small teams turn chaos into process. The ProcessDriven Approach™️ combines software expertise with practical process-first strategies that have helped 1,800+ teams build a scalable foundation of business systems.
