Remote Working - The Most Important Meetings

In this article I want to talk about some meetings which I hope every company will be running each week.

The Monday Kickoff

In an office setting, I would only interact with a few people in my department each week. Sometimes entire weeks go by and I would not have interacted with a couple of the strategists or designers. But in an office setting I can still see their faces at their desks. I know that they exist, and what they do. When your entire department is remote, you have lost that simple human connection of seeing someone's face. This is why the Monday morning kickoff is so important.

The Monday morning kick off meeting is the most important meeting of the week. I'm not just talking about setting weekly priorities and getting status updates. I'm not talking about everyone seeing what everyone is doing either. I'm talking about seeing all the faces in your department. It's about having that human connection. For some people, it will be the only time in the week where you will actually see other people in your department.

If your department workflow allows it, I would recommend having another check-in point in addition to the Monday kickoff. For example, some companies might want to hold a status meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. These are natural intervals which are not very intrusive.

Daily Project Stand-up

Seeing all of your teammates each day is very important. It's not good enough to just send them a message on a Slack channel. Seeing a person on video helps keep people connected in a human way.

Each team in your department should have a video call each day. Some teams will want this at 9am, while others prefer another time of the day. It's totally ok to have a daily project at 5pm. Just ensure that this daily call is held at the same time every day, everyone attends, and everyone gets a chance to speak.

In a Scrum team, we time-box this to 15mins. It is simply a quick check in so that people can flag any issues for the day. There is typically no need to go beyond 15mins.

Friday Round-off

When we are in a physical office, I typically see this starting around 3pm or 4pm (depending on your team/organisation). People tend to become a little more relaxed and chatty. This is the team bonding over the successes and challenges of the week. People ask what they are doing on the weekend. So rounding off the week is a ritual of comradeship.

Human interaction (seeing faces) is really important, and we all crave it in all different ways. So my recommendation is do have a Friday Round-off video call.

Last week, all the developers had an end of week Zoom call. Most of us had not seen each other all week (let alone chatted), so this was a great opportunity to just catch up and chat about things. This is an opportunity to actually interact with people who you normally don't see.

This meeting doesn't have to be the entire department. It totally depends on you. It just needs to be social, and is meant to simulate your Friday afternoon casual chats. You may even decide to do something like a Friday Bar. It's a great global Umbraco community Friday event.

Final Thoughts

Remote teams need rituals to facilitate human interaction. I recommend a Monday Kickoff, Daily Check-ins/Stand-ups, and Friday Round-off. These meetings are not meant to be just for status updates (although still very important). These meetings are a chance for your teams to see each others faces and have human interaction.

I hope you find this article useful, and I highly recommend you introduce these video calls in your remote teams.