Meeting Culture: How to achieve meeting performance excellence

Review your meeting performance and drive change

Pre-work #1: Meeting Inventory

Pre-work #2: Meeting questions

Results

Review Results and Decide on Changes

Data

Explore

Results

Ad-hoc meetings

How much unplanned, ad-hoc meeting time was added to our schedule?

Person

Ad-hoc as % of total

Ad-hoc meeting time

Total time in meetings

Al Chen

58%

3 hrs 30 mins

6 hrs

Lola Tseudonym

50%

1 hr 30 mins

3 hrs

James Booth

32%

2 hrs

6 hrs 15 mins

Elise Keith

30 mins

12 hrs 20 mins

Joel Davis

1 hr

Mary Jones

6 hrs 30 mins

There are no rows in this table

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What to Look For

Ad-hoc meetings reduce your team’s ability to plan their time. These meetings are especially hard on knowledge workers with delivery responsibilities.

Organizations with high levels of meeting performance maturity work to minimize ad-hoc meetings. This gives teams control over their schedules and establishes a predictable communication rhythm.

Teams plan for meetings in two ways.

Cadence: Teams decide to run the same type of meeting at the same time during each work cycle. For example, a retrospective held at the end of each work sprint is part of that team’s meeting cadence.

Trigger: These meetings are held in response to an event. You can list these using an If > Then statement. For example, IF a prospect calls about our services, THEN sales schedules an introductory meeting.

Ad-hoc meetings, on the other hand,

appear on the calendar unpredictably⁠

and often represent a breakdown in your meeting system. If your team gets pulled into lots of ad-hoc meetings, dig into why that’s happening and discuss ways to better handle those situations.

Breakdown of ad-hoc meetings by person

Breakdown of ad-hoc meetings by person

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👉 Next:

Effectiveness and Importance⁠

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