How to Run Effective Meetings that Span the Globe

There’s something uniquely challenging yet profoundly rewarding about wrapping meetings as the sun sets at home in the middle of Canada while the sun is rising on a teammate in Taiwan but this is just my weekly routine.

As a lead at Automattic I’m responsible for leading and directing individuals and teams distributed remotely around the world. Except for team meetups where 2 or 3 weeks out of the year we travel to work together for a time the only commonality for our location is that we’re not in the same room. We’re all working out of spare rooms, co-working locations, or cafés. Sometimes thousands of kilometres apart.

At one point this year I was leading a 45-person group of software engineers in our product organization, with 8 direct reports who in turn led 8 different teams. One team was entirely APAC-based with members in Taiwan, Japan, Australia, and Thailand. Other teams were spread out across time zones in Europe and the Americas.

Product designers don’t report in to the product engineering organization and we required close-knit collaboration with a design team located in the Europe and South America.

At the same time, all of us were working on several different projects that required cross-team collaboration, with many of us pivoting to new streams of work for the quarter.

Working with almost 50 people in 9 different teams, in 2 role-based organizations, remotely distributed across the 4 corners of the earth presented some challenges to say the least. Particularly in how we’d meet to resolve issues and direct next steps.

Here’s where we landed on those meetings.

A 10 out of 10 meeting agenda

Meetings have a bad reputation of being boring and largely a waste of time. The more people you have in a meeting, the worse it is with total person hours wasted.

At the same time, they can’t be avoided. Some decisions and issues are best resolved synchronously, with every person in the room together, at least on a video call.

So, if meetings are a necessity while also at high risk of being a waste of time, you’re going to want to make sure they’re actually good. Having an actual agenda is an obvious great first start.

I’ve adapted the Level 10 Meeting Agenda from the Entrepreneurial Operating System for the group meetings I run. I’ve found it to be a great start. It’s so-named because every meeting wraps by asking participants to rate the meeting out of 10. If someone’s rating is lower than 10 I have a chance to ask, “what would have made this meeting a 10 for you” and I can course correct going forward. Concluding a meeting with an opportunity for feedback (like ending a coaching session with “What was most useful for you?”) is a great idea. It’s an Antifragile idea. The more you meet and get feedback, the more likely you are to have 10 out 10 meetings.

I’m also a fan of kicking off the meeting with some good news from the past week. It’s a chance for us to remind each other that we’re all people with lives outside of work and start things off on a positive note.

The highlight of the meeting is the “IDS” section. Where you identify, discuss, and solve issues. We keep a backlog in a shared Google Doc but, following the Level 10 Meeting format, we don’t just start at the top of the list and work down. We first spend a bit of time trying to identify the highest priority issues and tackle those first. This is pretty important. First, you’re not always going to have time to resolve every issue but more importantly, higher priority issues often are likely to be root issues of other problems. In the three months I’ve been using this agenda format I’ve definitely seen that step resolve later issues more than a few times.

We haven’t adopted the Level 10 format wholesale though.

Currently, we’ve essentially combined the scorecard, rock review, and headlines into one section. I provide a review of headlines on key projects, pulling in metrics, where it makes sense, and collecting feedback from the meeting participants, that sometimes reveals issues to discuss later. I may experiment with becoming more formalized here and adapting more and more of the agenda as we go.

We also introduced a new section, together, as a team called Capacity. Each participant is (usually) an Engineering Team lead and in this section we check in with everyone on their teams capacity to take on new work in the next 1–2 weeks. This has helped us manage productivity as we near the wrap up stage of various projects but it’s been enormously helpful for responding to requests with stakeholders when high priority work comes in. I’m usually able to respond pretty quickly with a short summary of which teams are free to pivot at any time.

A meeting for leads anyone can attend

I noted above that each participant in the meetings we hold are “usually” Engineering Team Leads. It’s definitely for team leads to meet, stay informed, direct work, and resolve issues but I like to adopt an inclusive approach here and not limit the meeting to just leads. I’ll avoid it even in the calendar event title.

I keep the meeting open to anyone that would like to join if they’re there to participate by working through issues or updating the group on status on a project. This has generally kept the meetings small and focused. It’s not been uncommon for a lead to bring a project lead into the calls. And generally, if possible, I like to have someone come in as a substitute from the team when a lead can’t make it. So, it’s still a leads meeting but the nuance is important.

I tell my teams that to attend a meeting, “probably the easiest way is to just show up.” You’ll see me share a zoom link and meeting notes in Slack at the time of the call. But for convenience I ask that non-leads coordinate with their lead or me with a quick ping beforehand. That gives me a chance to update the agenda and not accidentally miss them when I loop through some of the routines in the call.

The expectation is also set that if you’re there in the meeting, you’re there to work. You should be providing updates on project status as needed in order to work with the group to resolve issues. A meeting that you can just sit in to collect information should have been a P2 post.

Meeting weekly around the world

I’m currently holding meetings on my Monday night in an APAC Friendly time zone and on my Tuesday morning with team members in Europe and the Americas. But holding meetings across multiple time zones was really tricky to get right.

My first challenge was that I only had one team that was in an APAC time zone. I wanted meeting sessions where we were working together through issues and collaborating on shared projects and that’s hard with only one team lead. Additionally, with a large group of people who I hoped could operate together as one large team, I absolutely did not want one team feeling siloed and isolated.

We lucked out in that two other team leads in the Americas had people in APAC time zones as well. They were already meeting with team members in their evening. They were able to start attending our lead meetings on a regular basis, sometimes alternating between the two different meetings biweekly.

This actually turned a challenge into an opportunity. Several times we were able to carry over team-wide discussions from one meeting to the next. Starting a conversation in one time zone, and bringing it to another team. We could keep track of this with issues in our Google Doc backlog.

And this dovetailed neatly into a call following the same format that we hold with our Design partners on Wednesday. This call largely follows the same format as the Level 10 agenda but here I’ll often lead a review of all projects at a high level. This allows our designers to stay on top of priorities and aligned with where we need to go next.

A meeting routine that makes a week of wins

All told this can add to up to quite a bit of time every week but we’ve been able to keep every meeting productive thanks to the Level 10 meeting format. These were sometimes the most productive times of the week for me as a lead as I was able to direct, redirect, and pivot into new work, resolve issues that were blocking us or that might result in us being blocked, and pull in resources on things early. Worth it.