Meetical for Engineering Meetings

Meeting design and execution is challenging. As a Head of / Chief of, or lateral leader, an effective communication architecture is one of your key responsibilities. Make sure careless meetings don’t slow down your teams. With Meetical, it’s easy to foster a culture for transparent, goal-driven and efficient meetings.

Tech Leaders Meetings

How Meetical helps for different types of meetings

1-on-1 meetings
Team meetings
Tactical and Strategic Meetings
Management Status updates
Quarterly reviews
All-hands meetings
The meeting about meetings

1-on-1 meetings

Build better relationships with your colleagues. As managers, spending time in 1-on-1 mode, can be very rewarding. Both on a personal and professional level.

Regularly exchange with direct reports, developers, your Scrum Masters, your Product Owners, and your own manager. Take the opportunity to talk about personal goals, mid-term roadmaps and product vision.

Meeting pages for 1-on-1 s must be created well ahead of the event’s time. They help to collect frustration points and other important topics in the moment they appear in time. And allow you to time-travel your one-on-one meetings to create a sense of progress.

How Meetical helps...

Meetical includes a great template for 1-on-1 meetings to help you build great relationships
Meetical can create pages for recurring 1-on-1 meetings automatically, some days in advance
For privacy, you can easily restrict view permissions for an entire meeting series by configuring this on the series master page

"The automatic creation of a Confluence page for the recurring meetings has greatly impacted us and contributed to increasing the number of meetings that were documented and had good minutes."

Team meetings

In a broader sense, team meetings are needed the most, where a group of people has a common goal, but does not necessarily collaborate closely during daily work. Think of IT consulting teams, or sales people.
Those groups profit from in-person and human-friendly regular encounters.
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Make these meetings an event! Everyone should hand in written reports beforehand to keep things short and structured; Announcements can be made and resulting action items should be tracked. A shared Confluence meeting page will help you turn those meetings into events everybody is looking forward to.

How Meetical helps...

Foster a culture where people prepare for meetings by sharing their progress and a summary of their work beforehand
Make team meetings worth their time by having a clear agenda and allow everyone to contribute to the agenda

“In this new world where online meetings are the rule, not the exception, is impossible to build a company that learns without registering decisions, tasks, etc. And it used to be very hard before Meetical.

We are using it a lot in our company, and the permanent accountability note-taking creates inside a startup is priceless.”

Tactical and Strategic Meetings

The idea of these two types of meetings comes from Patrick Lencioni’s famos book “Death by Meeting”. Such meetings will however always appear in any organization with different names like Team Meeting, Department Sync, Planning, Monday morning meeting etc.

Strategy meetings help reinforce bigger goals for the organization. Help departments feel accountable for progress. Engage and align everybody on your team and make informed decisions.

Tactical meeting for teams and departments are starting with a lightning round so each participants can speak up, followed by a prepared progress review and a collaborative, dynamic agenda to address topics.

For both strategic and tactical meetings, questions, decistions and results must be tracked and a parking log for stategic topics helps to keep the meeting focused on tactics without loosing important ideas.

How Meetical helps...

Recurring tactical meetings profit from auto-creation features, ready-to-use templates and macros
Easily include reports from Jira or many other systems like Salesforce (with additional Apps)

Management Status updates

Tactical status meetings hold management teams accountable. But preparation is key.

Make sure everybody got their metrics, challenges and key questions prepared and shared, ahead of time. If done right, this meeting can actually eliminate a couple of other cross- department meetings.

How Meetical helps...

Automatically create pages for management status meetings and make asynchronous contributions easy
Use templates, @mentions and reporting macros to create a clear picture on where initiatives stand
Share meeting results within your organisation easy and fast; with everybody – or based on Confluence's fine granular permission system

Quarterly reviews

Reflect and reset for the coming quarter together with your team. This meeting is great to acknowledge achievements and positive progress. And teams can identify performance gaps and areas for improvement.

A great discussion can only take place when your peers are ready for a constructive debate. Uncover relevant conflicts and discussion points by kicking-off topics on a shared meeting page.

How Meetical helps...

Create a shared meeting page, including all important metrics within seconds!
Share meeting pages with people who contribute on the side, but do not need to attend the meeting itself
Make results from reviews transparent in your organisation and spread the knowledge

All-hands meetings

The all-hands meeting could be seen as the ultimate mashup meeting between managers and makers. The captain speaking – and listening – to the crew.

Should you create notes for all-hands meetings? You should certainly prepare such events, and distribute important announcements at the right moment. Be it immediately after the meeting or beforehand. Create a meeting culture by leading-by-example.

You can create tension (in a good way) by sharing topics ahead of time. You eliminate misunderstandings and rumors, by communicating clearly and timely. You create momentum by sharing written results and announcements immediately after the meeting. For all this, a shared meeting page in your knowledge base, right where your makers and managers live, is a powerful tool for every true leader.

How Meetical helps...

Meetical allows everyone in your organisation to quickly create and share meeting agendas and meeting minutes
Seamless Calendar Integration for Confluence helps to actually implement meeting best practices into daily workflows
Hold people accountable with action items and record important decisions easy and fast

“Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet.”
––– Henry Mintzberg

The meeting about meetings

Seriously a meeting about meetings? This meta-meeting or “mother of all meetings” as we could call it, sometimes even referred to as a joke, could be a powerful leadership instrument. The point is to be intentional with how meetings work best in your organisation!

Intentional meeting design is actually at the heart of many successful organisation architectures. Take Scrum, which is build upon 5+ very well designed meetings (called Scrum events for a reason).

Do you have clear guidelines in place for all the other meeting types?

Crafting an effective communication architecture is surely beyond the scope of a single meeting, defining clear guidelines and best practices for meetings lead to an effective communication architecture.

Lead by example and run an effective meeting about meeting design yourself –, or hire a specialist like Mike van Dyke to establish meeting practices of clear purpose, time-box, preparation, transparency and more.

How Meetical helps...

Meetical can help you to make Meeting Design more intentional in your organisation and ultimately waste less time in meetings
Together with us, roll out Meetical Meetings for Confluence, including specialised training and meeting best practices - tailored to your company!