A meeting cadence is how often a meeting is held. For example, if you and a direct report check in every Friday morning, that’s a weekly cadence. If you have a request to meet every other month, that’s a bimonthly cadence.
The challenge for every company is how frequently meetings should take place. In an increasingly distributed workforce where a face-to-face Zoom is sometimes the only interactions you’ll have with your team, these are often overscheduled in the hopes that these “in person” meetings will be beneficial to building relationships and team morale.

Meeting Cadence

Research shows that 15% of an organization's time is spent in meetings. Imagine moving that 15% towards actionable tasks that can increase revenue in your business? Less meetings and more money? An easy win. A whopping 73% of people admit to multitasking during meetings. Let your employees spend more time doing their work and less time passively listening in.

Fewer Meetings = Better Meetings

You want your team to know what everyone is working on, but you also want to allow for enough freedom for everyone to work autonomously.  Here are a few examples of some common meetings and how frequently they might meet. <ul><li>One-on-One Meetings: Weekly meeting cadence</li><li>All Hands: Quarterly meeting cadence</li><li>Daily standup meeting: Every day</li><li>Leadership Teams: Monthly meeting cadence</li></ul>

Different Companies, Different Needs

<ol><li>Do create an agenda. Make sure everyone knows what will be covered in advance so they can attend better prepared.</li><li>Don’t leave room for questions at the end. Instead, use Slack or email for any follow-ups since there’s never enough time at the end of the meeting to get to everyone’s questions.</li><li>Do invite-only key players to a meeting. It’s much easier to communicate in smaller groups.</li><li>Don’t go over the allocated meeting time.</li></ol>

Four Do’s and Don’ts For Your Meetings

Once you’ve determined that you’ve got a weekly cadence for one project and another weekly cadence for an all-staff check-in, that doesn’t mean these have to be formatted in the same way. You have to decide if the meeting is information seeking or information giving, which we alluded to earlier. This matters a lot when you’re determining how to best check-in.

Change Your Cadence: Asynchronous vs Synchronous Meetings

<ol><li>What is the goal of this meeting?</li><li>Can this meeting happen asynchronously?</li><li>Is this a high-priority or urgent task?</li><li>Do these types of meetings regularly run over the allotted time?</li><li>Do we run out of items to discuss in these types of meetings?</li></ol>

Five Questions To Ask Before Making a New Meeting Request

These meetings fall into any of the following categories:Seeking Information<ul><li>A kickoff meeting for a new project</li><li>A project team meeting to discuss next steps</li><li>Management meeting to check in on how teams are running</li><li>A one-on-one with a direct report to check in on goals and tasks</li></ul> For information giving meetings, those might be: <ul><li>A daily standup</li><li>A project update</li><li>A company’s annual report</li></ul>

Information Seeking And Giving

How often should you meet with your remote team? What can be an asynchronous update vs a synchronous meeting?  Here's how to decide how many meetings you need.