Running effective team meetings is hard in this current day and time, owing to the digital distractions and online meetings.
A study reports that an organization spends more than 15% of its time in meetings and in which middle managers spend more than 35% of their time and senior members spend 50% of their time in meetings. More than 65% of employees complain about spending too much time on meetings and that minimizes their productivity.
About 11 million meetings take place in the United States alone every day and one-third of them are unproductive and it roughly costs around #37 billion lost every year. This particular problem needs attention and solutions and Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) help solve this problem.
Why are OKR Meetings Important?
One of the important and biggest advantages of OKR meetings is, since OKRs are transparent, people who attend the meetings understand the priority. OKR meetings eliminate assumptions and silos. Teams work towards a common goal and the OKR planning meetings guide in setting priorities for the upcoming week, month, or quarter. OKRs retrospectives play a vital role in evaluating the lessons learned and the best practices from the last quarter and applying the learning to the OKR crafting.
OKR Meeting Agenda
An important parameter for OKR meetings is to set the agenda before going to the meetings. This may seem obvious, but we still think it should be stressed. Whenever there is an OKR meeting, make sure you cover the following agenda items:
- Start with overall progress discussion and last meetings action item
- Highlight Objective that is going well
- Discuss the At-risk and Off-track OKRs
- Go through the ad-doc objective (if needed)
- Rise focus on next week’s OKR meeting
- Abridge discussion and determine action items.
1-1 OKR Meetings
OKR meetings that happen 1-1 can be insightful. With 1-1 OKR meetings, managers and team members can have an unfiltered discussion on their account of the OKR progress or lack thereof. These meetings allow upward and downward communication. We can set the frequency like weekly, which will enable shorter and productive meetings
OKR Team Meetings
Since OKRs set the priority and tracks the team objective progress constantly and also it is transparent to all, it brings in Cohesive factor into the team meetings. There are no surprises or disappointments, hence the meetings are more productive and increase accountability.
Short Meetings
Like we said multiple times above, long meetings are a problem. This is because they don’t contribute much to justify its expense. When leaders do away with status meetings by using OKR tracking software, nearly half of the meeting time can be cut. Also, when team members check-in before meetings, the meetings have the potential to be short and quick. Say, for example, the meeting is on Wednesday, and the members have checked in their OKR on Tuesday itself, then the following day’s meeting can be clear and therefore quick.
Leadership OKR review meetings
The leadership team drives the OKRs as they contribute to the organization’s strategy. It is essential to hold fortnightly meetings with the department head and key stakeholders of OKR. This will eliminate the bias and ambiguity in the OKRs set. This makes the departments more ambitious as they also are sure about the safety net cast over them by the leadership team that allows them to fail and still go ahead with enthusiasm with the lessons learned in the failure. While breaking it down to a quarter gives more clarity and accountability.
To Wrap It UP
Team Meeting, despite its pitfalls, has its own merits. But even in using OKR, there comes a recommended plan for having an efficient OKR team meeting. These OKR team meetings can be crisp and quick with the plan of action.
