The short answer: I don’t!
The longer answer:
When I work with teams, I often suggest, “Can you put together a quick Loom to explain that, rather than presenting it in a meeting?”.
I don’t see this as a replacement for all meetings but rather a way to consciously decide what information should be communicated synchronously in a meeting. This way, the meetings that we do choose to have can be a lot more effective.
Why do I do this?
There are a couple of reasons:
- Synchronous meetings are costly in terms of the actual time commitment (a one-hour meeting slot), context switching, and lost productivity on either side of the meeting.
- Meetings are difficult to schedule. It becomes exponentially more difficult as you try to involve multiple stakeholders.
- The quality of conversation in most meetings is higher when we have a smaller group who can speak frankly. We generally want to minimise the number of non-speaking ‘spectators’ in a meeting. (There are exceptions to this when trying to build alignment across a large group).
- Tools like Loom enable people to add comments on a specific timestamp in the recording, allowing them to provide specific feedback/questions without interrupting the presenter’s flow.
- I’m a huge fan of written documentation, but recording a video is (for most people) quicker than producing a written document. And we don’t necessarily need to invest the time in writing up a document if this is more of an update than a decision.
- If a chunk of the video does not apply to one viewer, they can skip to the next section. Other viewers can also watch the video at 1.X speed, saving them time.
- Recording a video update puts most people in a more focused headspace than presenting live in a meeting: You’ll generally know what you want to cover and how long you want to spend doing that. You can start again if you lose your train of thought halfway through.
- Sharing thoughtful content related to the meeting in advance allows participants to reflect on and process it beforehand. This generally contributes to a higher-quality discussion during the meeting itself.
- Even if we manage to schedule a meeting with everyone we think needs to be involved, we will often realise, after the fact, that someone else would benefit from hearing that information. Yes, we can use meeting recordings, but from my experience, very few people will watch a whole meeting recording retrospectively. That’s not generally the case with focused video recordings, though.
How do I recommend doing it?
Let’s imagine a scenario where a team lead is asked to demonstrate a feature they’ve been working on recently. In your organisation, the default might be to schedule a one-hour meeting.
Everyone has techniques which work for them, but I like to think in terms of:
- Record a focused video for the ‘presentation’ component of the planned meeting—any part of the session that doesn’t require real-time communication. Let’s say this ends up being 15 minutes long.
- Put the video into an online tool. Ideally, it should support comments like Loom. Even better, if you want others to discover it in the future, consider putting it into your team knowledge base (Notion, Confluence, etc.).
- Share that update with the potential attendees beforehand; ask them to watch it beforehand. If they like, they can add comments on specific parts of the video they’d like to cover in more depth.
- If necessary, schedule a meeting for a follow-up discussion. Having shared the video in advance, you’ll usually find that:
- The recording will have covered a lot of the required information communication needs, you’ll able to schedule a somewhat shorter meeting; or
- You’ll opt to stick with scheduling a one-hour session, but sharing the video in advance will generally result in a much more productive discussion.
I know that this feels a bit counter-intuitive…
When I share this technique, people (especially senior stakeholders and team leads) often say, “This is going to take me even longer than just scheduling a meeting, and I’m already maxed out”.
Indeed, the first video takes quite a bit longer to put together; upload it to the cloud and circulate it. But I can assure you that:
- You’ll get much quicker at it once you do it a couple of times.
- If you model the behaviour, you’ll often find that your team reciprocates. Instead of being pulled into meetings that feel unproductive, people will start recording videos for you. This is the magical compounding effect!