How to run a weekly team meeting

Many weekly meetings start with a round of updates, in which each person says what they have done and what they are doing next. It seems efficient, because everyone hears everything. It is also expensive, for the same reason. In a team of eight, three minutes each takes 24 minutes, and the team spends more than three hours of its combined time listening.

Viktoria Stray, Dag Sjøberg, and Tore Dybå studied the daily stand-up, a short meeting in which each member of a software team says what they did, what they will do next, and what is in their way⁵5. Stray, V., Sjøberg, D. I. K., and Dybå, T. (2016). The daily stand-up meeting: A grounded theory study. Journal of Systems and Software, 114, 101–124. doi.org. They interviewed 60 people and watched 79 stand-ups in 12 teams at three companies. The factors that did most to make people positive about the meeting were sharing information with the team and the chance to discuss and solve problems. The factors that did most to make them negative were reporting status to the manager, and meetings that were held too often or went on too long.

A weekly meeting is longer and less frequent than a stand-up, and there is no equivalent study of it. The finding is still relevant, because many weekly meetings start in the same way, with each person reporting to the manager while the rest of the team waits.

Updates are information, and information can be written down. We recommend that each person writes a short update before the meeting, with the status of each of their priorities and anything that is in their way. Everyone can read all of the updates in the first five minutes. The meeting can then start from what the updates show, such as a priority that is off track or a decision someone needs.

Meetings often start late, even when most people are punctual. Rogelberg and colleagues surveyed 195 employees about more than 300 meetings⁶6. Rogelberg, S. G., Scott, C. W., Agypt, B., Williams, J., Kello, J. E., McCausland, T., and Olien, J. L. (2014). Lateness to meetings: Examination of an unexplored temporal phenomenon. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 23(3), 323–341. doi.org. People said they arrived late about 5% of the time, and 37% of the meetings started late. The average meeting in the survey had eight people. If each of eight people is late one time in 20, the chance that at least one of them is late is about one in three, which is close to the share the researchers found.

Joseph Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Rogelberg then tested what a late start does to a meeting⁷7. Allen, J. A., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., and Rogelberg, S. G. (2018). Let’s get this meeting started: Meeting lateness and actual meeting outcomes. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 39(8), 1008–1021. doi.org. They ran 48 meetings of five or six students, each asked for ideas to improve their university’s general education requirements. A third of the meetings started on time, a third five minutes late, and a third ten minutes late, while the students were told they were waiting for another participant. Every meeting ended at the same time, so the late ones were shorter. The meetings that started ten minutes late produced about a third fewer ideas than those that started on time, and fewer of their ideas were rated high in quality or feasible. The students rated the late meetings as less satisfying and less effective. During the ten-minute wait, the researchers counted 22 negative behaviours, such as criticism, interruptions, and side conversations, in the first five minutes and 55 in the second five.

A late start takes time from the end of the meeting, which in a weekly team meeting is the time for the last problems and the wrap-up. Start at the time in the invitation, whoever is missing, and do not go back over what anyone missed.

The minutes before the start are still useful. Allen, Lehmann-Willenbrock, and Nicole Landowski surveyed 252 working adults and found that small talk before a meeting predicted how effective people thought the meeting was, even allowing for good meeting practice⁸8. Allen, J. A., Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., and Landowski, N. (2014). Linking pre-meeting communication to meeting effectiveness. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 29(8), 1064–1081. doi.org. The link was stronger for less extraverted people. It was a single survey, so it cannot show that the small talk made the meetings better. It is a reason to arrive a few minutes early, not to start a few minutes late.

In 2010 Anita Williams Woolley and colleagues gave 699 people, working in groups of two to five, a series of tasks that included visual puzzles, brainstorming, moral judgements, and negotiating over resources⁹9. Woolley, A. W., Chabris, C. F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone, T. W. (2010). Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science, 330(6004), 686–688. doi.org. Groups that did well on one kind of task tended to do well on the others, and the researchers called this general ability collective intelligence. It was not strongly related to the average or the highest intelligence of the members. It was related to how socially perceptive the members were, to the proportion of women in the group, and to how evenly the members took turns to speak. Groups in which a few people dominated the conversation did less well than groups in which more people took turns.

The finding has been questioned. Marcus Credé and Garett Howardson re-examined six samples and concluded that the evidence for a general collective intelligence factor was weak¹⁰10. Credé, M., and Howardson, G. (2017). The structure of group task performance: A second look at “collective intelligence”. Comment on Woolley et al. (2010). Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(10), 1483–1492. doi.org. In 2021 Christoph Riedl, Woolley, and colleagues combined 22 studies with 5,279 people in 1,356 groups and found strong support for the factor¹¹11. Riedl, C., Kim, Y. J., Gupta, P., Malone, T. W., and Woolley, A. W. (2021). Quantifying collective intelligence in human groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(21), e2005737118. doi.org. They found that it was predicted most strongly by how the members worked together, followed by their individual skills and then by the make-up of the group. The debate is about whether one factor explains a group’s performance on every kind of task. It does not change the practical point for a weekly meeting. A meeting in which two people do most of the talking uses little of what the rest of the team knows.

The simplest check is to count. For one meeting, ask someone to note each time a different person starts to speak, and include the person chairing.

We recommend two changes to the agenda. The first is to start with a short round in which each person shares one piece of good news from the week, which gives everyone a turn in the first five minutes. Sigal Barsade found in a laboratory study that a mood expressed by one person spread through a group, and that groups in which a good mood spread cooperated more and had less conflict¹²12. Barsade, S. G. (2002). The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and its Influence on Group Behavior. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47(4), 644–675. doi.org. The second is for the person chairing to speak last on each problem. The guide to making decisions as a team explains why the order in which people speak matters.

Kauffeld and Renee Meyers coded 33 group discussions in three German industrial companies, statement by statement¹³13. Kauffeld, S., and Meyers, R. A. (2009). Complaint and solution-oriented circles: Interaction patterns in work group discussions. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 18(3), 267–294. doi.org. A complaint made another complaint more likely to follow, and a proposed solution less likely. A proposed solution was followed by more discussion of solutions. When someone agreed with a complaint or with a solution, a run of the same kind of statement followed. The authors concluded that a discussion needs structure to stop complaints from spreading.

In a study of 59 team meetings in 19 organisations, Lehmann-Willenbrock, Allen, and Kauffeld looked at procedural statements, which organise the discussion, such as suggesting what to discuss next or bringing people back to the point¹⁴14. Lehmann-Willenbrock, N., Allen, J. A., and Kauffeld, S. (2013). A Sequential Analysis of Procedural Meeting Communication: How Teams Facilitate Their Meetings. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 41(4), 365–388. doi.org. Procedural statements were followed by more talk about who would do what and when, and by less losing the thread, criticising, and complaining. The more evenly these statements were spread across the team, the more satisfied the members were with the discussion and its results. Anyone in the meeting can make them.

An agenda is the first structure a meeting has. In a survey of 367 people about their most recent staff or team meeting, Cohen and colleagues found that using an agenda, starting and ending on time, the quality of the room, and having someone to run the meeting were each related to how good people thought it was¹⁵15. Cohen, M. A., Rogelberg, S. G., Allen, J. A., and Luong, A. (2011). Meeting design characteristics and attendee perceptions of staff/team meeting quality. Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 15(1), 90–104. doi.org.

We recommend a fixed agenda that gives about two-thirds of the hour to a list of the team’s problems. Anyone can add a problem to the list during the week. At the start of the problems section, the team ranks the top three. Start with the first and stay on it until the team agrees what will happen, then move to the second. Working through problems in the order they were raised gives the most time to whichever came up first, whether or not it matters most. Starting with the easy ones gets through more of them and leaves the important ones for next week.

A problem can be a priority that is off track, a customer complaint, a process that keeps failing, or a decision someone needs. Write each one as a short statement of what is wrong. “The weekly report goes out late” is a problem. “The weekly report” is only a topic.

A discussion that ends in agreement but no action leaves the problem where it was. In Kauffeld and Lehmann-Willenbrock’s study, action planning, meaning statements about who would do what, was one of the kinds of discussion that went with more satisfied teams¹1. Kauffeld, S., and Lehmann-Willenbrock, N. (2012). Meetings Matter: Effects of Team Meetings on Team and Organizational Success. Small Group Research, 43(2), 130–158. doi.org. Before the team moves on from a problem, the person chairing should say what was agreed, who will do it, and by when, and someone should write it down.

Work that will take more than a week belongs in someone’s plan, as part of one of their priorities for the quarter, where it is checked every week with the rest of their work. The guide to setting quarterly priorities covers how to write those priorities. Work that cannot start until something else is decided is a new problem, and goes on the list.

Checking what was agreed at the next meeting matters as much as agreeing it. Harkin and colleagues analysed 138 experiments in which one group was prompted to monitor its progress towards a goal and another was not¹⁶16. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. doi.org. Monitoring improved goal attainment, and the effect was larger when progress was reported to other people or written down. Most of the studies were about health, such as diet and exercise, so the evidence for work is thinner. It still supports a simple rule. Read back last week’s actions at the start of the plan section, and say whether each one was done.

A debrief, also called an after-action review, is a short discussion after a piece of work about what went well, what did not, and what to change. Scott Tannenbaum and Christopher Cerasoli combined 46 samples with 2,136 people and found that debriefs improved performance by about 25% on average, compared with control groups¹⁷17. Tannenbaum, S. I., and Cerasoli, C. P. (2013). Do Team and Individual Debriefs Enhance Performance? A Meta-Analysis. Human Factors, 55(1), 231–245. doi.org. The effect was similar for teams and for individuals, in simulations and in real work, and in medical and other settings. Debriefs worked best when the discussion was about the same things that were measured, and there were signs that structure and someone to run the discussion helped.

A rating at the end of each weekly meeting is the shortest kind of debrief. Each person in turn scores the meeting from 1 to 10. Anyone who gave a low score says what would have made it better, and the team agrees one change for next week. Nobody argues with a score. The reasons matter more than the numbers, and if the scores fall over several weeks, something is wrong even if nobody has said so.

You can make all of these changes in time for next week’s meeting.

1. Ask each person, privately, what they would keep and what they would change about the weekly meeting. Perlow, Hadley, and Eun recommend collecting views from everyone before changing anything, and then going through them together as a team²2. Perlow, L. A., Hadley, C. N., and Eun, E. (2017). Stop the Meeting Madness. Harvard Business Review, July–August 2017. hbr.org.
2. Fix the time and the length. We recommend one hour, at the same time each week. Start on time, whoever is missing.
3. Move updates into writing. Each person writes the status of their priorities, and anything in their way, before the meeting.
4. Keep one list of the team’s problems, which anyone can add to during the week. Write each problem as a short statement of what is wrong.
5. Use the same agenda every week, with good news, the plan, problems, and a wrap-up.
6. End each problem with who does what, and by when. Read back the actions at the end of the meeting, and check them at the start of the next one.
7. Rate every meeting. After six weeks, go through the scores and the reasons with the team, and change what is not working.

Headwater is built for companies that want to run on one plan with a weekly rhythm. In Headwater, the weekly team meeting is called a huddle. It follows the same agenda, with the plan split into initiatives and climbs, and the team works through its issues list in the same hour.