Episode Summary

We’ve all heard the comment, “Well that could have been an email” in relation to meetings. But it’s really the truth! As we grow our businesses and add team members, our time spent communicating with them is going to increase. But meetings can be expensive, and it’s important to take a quality-over-quantity approach. 

In this episode of the podcast, Melissa Swink discusses team communications and how to cut back on the time spent in meetings. She provides communication tools to improve efficiency, tips on reevaluating the necessity of meetings, and how to use tools like Voxer and Loom to reduce the need for real-time meetings. She also shares strategies for making meetings more efficient. Listen now!

Key Highlights:

• Reevaluate the necessity of meetings and consider using communication tools like Slack, Asana, Voxer, and Loom to reduce the need for real-time meetings.
• Prepare for meetings by creating an agenda and posing brainstorming questions ahead of time.
• Evaluate who needs to be present in meetings and structure the agenda to minimize unnecessary attendance.
• Facilitate effective discussions by staying on task, managing side conversations, and focusing on the meeting agenda.
• Limit the duration of meetings to allow for transition time and follow-up tasks.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast, where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we're going to be talking about team communications, and more specifically, taking a quality versus quantity approach to meetings, and also talking about communication tools that can drastically reduce the amount of meetings that you have on your calendar,

while maintaining that efficient communication and even more improved communication strategies. So the idea for this episode came from a conversation that I was having with our senior VA team about meetings and how really they can be quite expensive. So when we were talking about this, we were looking at a couple of clients and their accounts and taking a look

the overall usage in terms of their hours, what are we using productively for completing tasks and projects, and how much of that time is spent with communication. So with emails and with meetings and things like that. And there were some accounts that we noticed that they tended to be more meeting heavy and more email heavy and that there was just a whole lot of communications going back and forth.

And we were like, you know, how can we encourage our team and our clients to work together as efficiently as possible so that we're able to spend more of the time that we have with them doing the work versus communicating about the work, if that makes sense. Because the reality is, is as you grow your team, whether that be onboarding employees or interns or onboarding a virtual assistants, freelancers, know, fractional teams like ours,

your time spent communicating is also going to be increasing no matter where you're starting at. If you're a solopreneur and everything currently lives in your head, you need to transfer that to the outside world so that others can receive your ideas and learn how to do the tasks that you're ultimately outsourcing to them. you know, every time that you add a member to your small but mighty team that

increases the amount of one -on -ones you may be having, or that might be increasing temporarily some of the onboarding and the training and the handing off of tasks that need to happen. But meetings can become very, very expensive. You're spending a lot of time communicating with your group in real time. The more time that you spend can be costly, and the number of people that you have in those meetings can just multiply that amount.

And in fact, I was doing a little bit of research trying to figure out getting ready for this episode. You know, what is kind of the norm in terms of meetings? And according to FlowTrace, an average employee spends about three hours per week in meetings and about a third of employees indicate that they spend more than five hours a week in meetings. You may be hearing this right now and certainly depending on the role that you have in your company and where you're in business.

That might seem like a lot to you, that might sound like a small amount to you, but the reality is is that we can pretty much figure out that the average team member that you would have spends several hours a week in meetings or communicating via email. I didn't even pull email numbers into this, but the more streamlined that we can become in our team communications, the better it is for everybody, because who doesn't run into meeting fatigue?

who doesn't have email overload and email fatigue. And so the way that we can communicate, if there are ways to improve upon that and save us from some of that overload and that time and overall increase our efficiency and effectiveness of working together, the better. So if you're paying team members to meet with you frequently or for long periods of time, these expenses are probably adding up. And I have some suggestions of what to

to reduce your overall meeting time so that you can save hundreds monthly and be more effective in your communications. So number one is to reevaluate if meetings are necessary in the first place. Are there communication tools that are beyond phone or email or Zoom or Google Meet, whatever software you happen to be using for some of your virtual team communications or maybe your meeting in person, do we need to have a formal meeting?

or are we able to leverage other communication tools in order to keep work moving forward without necessarily requiring real -time involvement from everybody on the team? So, a couple of examples of this. We have a client who is a startup in a tech industry and he uses Slack to communicate with our team and other members of their team, answer questions, and this Slack channel is organized based on projects.

You know, we have project number one over here, and then there's the communication with the team members who are involved in that project. They're able to update each other on a status. They're able to answer a question, and they're just able to collaborate within that Slack channel so that they're not having to have a live call and discuss all of these things on a daily, weekly basis, what have you. Now, some other examples that we have in streamlined communications, as I've mentioned before,

our team uses a project management tool called Asana. And in Asana, we have all of our internal and client tasks and projects listed in there, and we're able to communicate at the project and task level with one another. Again, this removes the need for us to have a quote unquote weekly project meeting where we're discussing these things in real time. We're able to discuss them in the system as time allows, and people are able to respond.

and to chime in at their convenience. We're not requiring people to be available in real time for a call like that. Now, some of my other communication tools that I love using with my team that have drastically reduced the amount of meetings that we need to have, Voxer is one of them. Voxer is basically like a walkie talkie app on your phone that you can just send a voice memo to a team member.

You can send to an individual team member if you have specific questions or comments for them, or you can also create groups about specific topics. For example, I have a group for my senior VA team who oversee client relationships. They oversee other members of our team just to make sure that everybody is working together successfully. And so when I have things that pertain to all client accounts,

or all team members, I can go into that senior VA chat and share the information there. And again, people are able to receive that message, listen to it at their convenience, respond at their convenience, and I'm not requiring their real -time involvement in a meeting. Another thing that I use with communication for not only our team, but even clients as well, is Loom, L -O -O I believe I've talked about it before on this podcast.

But with Bloom, I'm able to record screen shares of different things. So I can cross train and walk through tasks that I want to hand off to somebody, or I can provide some feedback on maybe a marketing campaign that we're putting together and things like that. And again, that reduces the overall amount of real time communication that I require from my team. And we're able to work together much more efficiently using these tools.

If you do find that a real -time meeting with your team members is necessary, there's a couple of things that we can do to make sure that they are as efficient as possible. And my number one tip for that is to prepare, prepare, prepare. So I always recommend having an agenda put together ahead of time, ideally sent to your team members one to two days or maybe even more than that, more notice than that.

with a specific agenda of what we're going to be discussing and covering during the meeting. That just helps keep everybody focused and sets the tone for here's what we're going to be talking about today. Now the other piece to this is that if you need some brainstorming or maybe some problem solving to be done in the meeting, I love posing some of those questions ahead of time.

so that the team is doing some pre -brainstorming, maybe doing a little research and coming to the meeting with those ideas or with those suggestions or recommendations, rather than approaching them with this during the meeting and then spending that time with people just kind of coming up with some ideas or brainstorming solutions in real time. This gives them an opportunity if I pose the meeting and say, I am looking for some

Diaz for a new lead magnet for the website. So before our marketing meeting, I could send that out to my team and just pose that question. And then it's something that they can ponder and think about and kind of marinate on over the next couple of days leading up to that meeting so that when we come to that item on our agenda, they have some of these things prepared and we're not all sitting together and just trying to figure things out while the clock is ticking, if you will, if that makes

The other suggestion that I have in terms of preparation for the meeting is evaluating who needs to be there. Maybe you're meeting one -on -one with somebody. Obviously, this pertains less to that situation. But if you have a meeting where multiple people need to be involved, does every single person need to be there for the entire duration of the meeting? Or are there certain items on the agenda that pertain to some more than others?

And if that's the case, what you can do is rearrange the meeting agenda items, the order of those items, and invite people to join the meeting, say, halfway through or the last 15 minutes if there's only one item that pertains to them. And then that way, you're not paying your team to be there for the entire meeting when 75 % of it doesn't pertain to them anyway. And I know I have been in meetings like this. I'm sure you have as well.

where my presence was not required for that entire meeting, and then you just kind of sit there, you're a little bored, and then by the time it rolls around to your turn, your brain is kind of like half checked out. So think about who needs to be there and how can you structure the order of the meeting so that you only have people present as much as they need to be. Okay, the other thing that I wanted to share in terms of making meetings more efficient is to consider limiting

the duration of meetings so that you have a little bit of transition time built in. So this could look like setting a meeting for 20 or 25 minutes versus 30 minutes so that you have that five or 10 minutes afterwards to maybe tidy up your notes, maybe set yourself some reminders, take some next action steps, get ready to transition to the rest of your day, that sort of thing.

If you're looking at an hour meeting, maybe you set it for 45 minutes or 50 minutes again. So you have that transition time. You can quickly send off those meeting notes to the other team members as a recap. You can add follow -up tasks that came from the meeting into your project management system. You can make sure that everybody is on the same page in terms of what needs to happen next with a follow -up email and things like

That way it's fresh in your mind, you can wrap up those things and then transition to the rest of your day without it kind of leading in. I know when I have back to back meetings where I'm on, you know, at the 30 minutes or the top of the hour all day long, I have a mountain of follow up things from all of my meetings to try and sift through at the end of the day. And this just makes that time more efficient. The last tip that I have, if you find

real -time meetings are necessary is to make sure that you're facilitating an effective, efficient discussion. And I know that this can seem obvious, but you would be surprised at how many meetings I have attended, and I'm sure you have attended these as well, where the meeting gets off track, where maybe we start going down a rabbit hole. Maybe the intention was to talk about...

updates that we want to make to our website. And we have all of our marketing people there and they're throwing out ideas. And then we get onto a topic of, you know, open the social media icons. We're no longer on, we're no longer keeping our YouTube channel up. This is just an example, a hypothetical example. Let's remove that. And then somebody says, you know, I really think that we should be on TikTok. And then we kind of go down this rabbit hole and we've all been there. We've all done it,

again, returning to the agenda and maybe even assigning somebody to be that facilitator to make sure that everyone on the call stays on task and stays focused on these items, maybe is there to also add ideas that come up in the meeting that maybe don't pertain to that particular scope, but maybe putting them into a parking lot or a quote unquote, like follow up list for ideas to review later.

at another time, not necessarily taking away from the overall agenda and scope of the meeting that has been gathered for that point in time. The other thing that can happen, too many side conversations, or maybe we've spent the first 10 minutes talking about our weekend and all the places that we went to or that new restaurant that we tried. I think all those things are really important

connection and team building. I certainly don't wanna take away from that, but just being very mindful of how long we're spending on these kinds of things before diving into the scope of the call. That can be a way that all of a sudden we're spending all this time catching up and having fun, and then we've got 15 more minutes to dive into all the things that are on our agenda. So wanted to make sure that we're conscious of that.

All of that being said, I think that there are lots of great communication tools out there in this day and age that can not only eliminate meetings that aren't necessary, make work more efficient and more convenient for everybody on your team, including yourself, but then there are also ways to run really good meetings that people want to show up to and that are powerful for getting things done. And so I hope that these tips were helpful to you.

and facilitating conversations with your team, especially as you're new in the stage of working with a team or maybe building a team and wanting to make sure that everybody's on the same page. There are lots of great ways to do that. So that being said, if you know an entrepreneur who is building a team and learning as they go, would you share this episode with them? It may save them hundreds of dollars on the manual labor that can become

these group think meetings or having too many meetings or calls and things. And this will give them some tools to communicate with their team more effectively and be more productive in the meetings that they do have on their calendar. Thank you so much for joining us today. I appreciate you. I hope this was helpful. Go ahead and follow, subscribe to our Make Space for More podcast for more tips to grow and scale your business beyond you. Have a wonderful day and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye everyone.