Have you ever been in a meeting and thought, "Why am I even here?" and then started daydreaming or doing other work on your laptop? After meetings that drudge on and on, it's easy to leave them more confused than when you started.
Meetings are the worst! Of course, there are tons of tips on how to run an efficient and productive meeting, but how about being more efficient and productive by NOT scheduling meetings. Skip them! Well, not really. There are situations where a meeting is necessary, but many of our daily meetings are pointless, calendar-eating blocks of time that we will never get back.
Atlassian tools offer so many different ways to facilitate collaboration without sitting around a table at a specific time of day, requiring people to be engaged. Everyone's workloads are scattered throughout the day, and asking them to align priorities during a very specific block of time is not necessarily the best way to get people to collaborate effectively.
Instead, creating a Confluence page focused on a specific topic - providing an outline of the work items that need to be addressed. 'Mentioning' your colleagues with the @mention feature notifies them about changes to the page, and they can collaborate when it works best for them. If a specific approval is needed from management, or if you need a colleague's feedback, you can leave an inline comment, which will notify them of your request or comment. If more discussion is needed, any team member can create a Stride room, that references the Confluence page. This will allow team members to actively collaborate on the topic. The communications can happen at a faster rate, allowing for more depth conversation (without a meeting).
This method will encourage and promote engagement with your remote employees and give them a seat at the table (so to speak). If the topic requires inputs from others not originally part of the conversation, it's easy to add them to the Confluence page or Stride room. They can quickly read the conversation and get up to speed.
Many people have a tendency to conclude meetings with no structured outcomes, deliverables, or expectations of team members. When you are using Confluence as your collaboration tool, it's easy to create tasks directly on the page. Since all Atlassian tools can be very transparent, team members are more accountable for completing the follow-up on time. In this example of a Confluence template for meeting notes, you can quickly add team members to a page, capture goals and discussion items and assign tasks:
Ditch the meetings – let those calendars breath – give people their time back, and do it all while accomplishing more, in less time.
