Creativity and collaboration are enhanced when you get the right people together in a meeting.
Shopify’s decision to cancel all meetings with more than two employees has received a lot of commentary over the past 48 hours. It is an interesting move that Shopify claims will result in the deletion of more than 10,000 calendar events each year. But should you be adopting a similar policy if you are a founder running a startup?
The short answer is no.
For startup founders, meetings are a powerful tool. Used correctly they should be motivating to the attendees and are an effective way of collecting hard-to-gather feedback. Rather than canceling meetings, founders should focus on creating robust agendas for meetings that deliver engaging and inspiring content for the attendees.
Choosing to cancel meetings can lead to many negative consequences:
Mission Misalignment
Nobody reads emails or Slack messages or other forms of written content properly. To cope with the incredible amount of information we receive each day, we skim. If you want your message to be absorbed and understood, you need to get in front of your audience and deliver that message directly to them. Then follow up in writing.
Failure to communicate frequently with your team gives space for misalignment to creep in. Assumptions are made about the direction of the company. Key policies are interpreted differently. Rumors start circulating. Not everybody is pulling in the same direction.
As leaders of your organization, founders need to be visible and provide a consistent and reassuring presence. This gives employees the confidence to do their best work and take advantage of the relative autonomy of working in a startup.
It’s worth remembering that the perfect strategy you have in your head will not be fully understood by your team unless you tell them about it on an ongoing basis. Team meetings are the perfect forum to continually communicate the company’s strategy.
No Real-Time Feedback
Facial expressions tell you so much about what a person is thinking. The ability to deliver some information and then see how your team reacts in real-time is entirely lost without a meeting. Employees are unlikely to message you to say ‘that’s a stupid idea‘, but how they react in the moment when you are speaking to them is hard to hide.
Without meetings, we put friction between the team and founders. Very few people will proactively offer feedback if they don’t have to – why risk it? But in a room, those barriers can be lowered and useful feedback can flow far more easily.
Weakened Social Bonds
Meetings are not just about the meetings. It’s about the fist bump, handshake, or hug on arrival. The personal catch-ups – ‘how’s the family?‘ – remind us that we are all humans and not just work units in a machine. The bio breaks where we bump into somebody we haven’t spoken to in a while. And the opportunity, particularly prevalent in the UK, to go to the pub for a drink afterward.
Meetings create time for team engagement which builds bonds between members. A team that enjoys spending time together is far more likely to work a few extra hours, go the extra mile to help out a colleague, and be committed to their work.
Whilst the world has changed significantly in the past few years, fundamental human behaviors have not, and engaged teams will always outperform those that are not.
Inadvertent Culture Wars
Some of your team may be delighted if you cancel meetings. Others will feel isolated and that they are missing out on interactions with their colleagues which energize them.
Canceling meetings creates an imbalanced culture suited to a more introverted personality type and excludes those who would prefer to spend time together in person. By extension, it makes it much harder to create and grow a balanced company culture, where everybody feels they belong.
Reduced Employee Visibility
We all want to be seen. We all want to have successes celebrated. Canceling meetings removes a powerful forum for founders to recognize the achievements of their teams which in turn can generate a significant amount of goodwill.
Startup founders often look to larger companies to learn how to lead their organizations. In this case, larger companies have such different dynamics from smaller startups that it would be a mistake to replicate their practices. To beat the odds and change the world, startup founders need to build teams that are aligned, engaged, motivated, inspired, passionate, and committed. This cannot be done without meetings.
