Team and Other Meetings: Designing Spaces That Work

Introduction

In many workplaces, the phrase “Let’s have a meeting” sparks groans, not excitement. And it’s understandable: too often, meetings are unstructured, purposeless, or dominated by a few voices. They’re sometimes even just the chance for a few egos to wang on about stuff, or to generate some mild excitement in an otherwise boring workday.

But meetings, when designed and led well, are not the enemy of productivity. They are the lifeblood of shared work – they’re where a lot of the actual hard work to do with culture, decision making and collaboration happens. We should really think of them as the place where culture is practiced and brought to life, strategy is aligned, and relationships are deepened.

At PeopleShift, we believe great meetings are tools for leadership, not interrupting wastes of time. This article explores how to approach different types of meetings with clarity, care, and impact. This is important because if your meetings are bad, your team culture is probably suffering too, whether you realize it or not.

Different Meetings, Different Purposes

Not all meetings are created equal, and they shouldn’t be run in the same way. As a leader or manager, it’s important to be clear on what a meeting’s real purpose is, and to share that. If the purpose is unclear, the outcomes will be too. We’ve seen teams sit through hour-long meetings where nobody could have told you what the meeting was actually for. That’s not collaboration. That’s collective time-wasting. And it’s often really expensive both in terms of opportunity cost, and in terms of demotivating people. (We’ve all seen those tee-shirts that say “today I endured another meeting that should have been an email“.)

Principles for Designing Good Meetings

1. Start With Why

Why are we meeting? What outcome do we need?

If there’s no clear need, don’t meet. Seriously. Cancelling an unnecessary meeting is an act of leadership, not laziness. Similarly, we should really decline meetings if someone sets one up without being clear on what the meeting is about or why we’re being asked to join.

2. Design for Inclusion

Who truly needs to be in the room?

How will all voices be heard, not just the loudest? In our experience, the most valuable contributions often come from the quietest people in the room, if you create the space for them to speak. Perhaps have a meeting “contract” that specifies some share of voice in the room? Perhaps ask attendees to reflect at the back of the meeting if everyone got to contribute?

3. Set a Thoughtful Structure

Agenda: Have you created a clear an purposeful agenda? (i.e. it’s not just an infeasible laundry list).

Time: Respect starts and endings. Running over is not a sign of productivity. It’s a sign of poor planning. It’s so so so frustrating for people. Start on time and finish on time, and a lot of the other things fall into place. This also significantly affects your wider culture in a positive way, partly as it’s so disrespectful to people if you waste their time by not doing this.

Roles: Clarify who is facilitating, who is recording decisions, who owns next steps. Are there other roles you need? Basically, be clear on what people are expected to do in meetings etc.

4. Foster Psychological Safety

Invite disagreement respectfully and work to normalise “I don’t know” and “I need help” moments. Leaders can role-model really well to help make these moments easier for people. You could also consider having regular “thank you” agenda points where people appreciate each other, or have regular “mistakes I make this week” sessions that normalise speaking about failure in a positive way (and boost humility).

5. Balance Efficiency and Humanity

Meetings are about tasks and relationships. They’re not entirely one of the other. Strive for a balance and make space for both types of agenda points. And try and manage expectations so everyone understands that both outcomes (task and relationships) are of value.

Celebrate wins, acknowledge effort, and stay relational, even when moving fast.

Practical Tips for Common Meeting Types

Team Meetings

Open with a check-in: “What’s one word for how you’re arriving today?” (or similar, just mix them up)

Focus equally on progress and team dynamics.

Rotate facilitation occasionally to build ownership. We’re big fans of changing who chairs meetings, particularly things like stand ups. As a great side benefit, we find that people become much better meeting attendees once they’ve had to chair some annoying meetings with badly behaved attendees.

Stand-Ups

Keep them truly short (10-15 minutes). If your “stand-up” regularly takes 45 minutes, it’s not a stand-up anymore (it’s a sit-down with extra steps). And it’s just annoying and demotivating for everyone.

Standard questions: What did I complete? What am I working on? What’s blocking me? And things like “how am I doing” and have i identified any opportunities for improvements, etc.

Problem-Solving Sessions

Use structured methods like brainstorming, fishbone diagrams, or “5 Whys.”

Separate ideation from evaluation. Create first, critique second.

Decision-Making Meetings

Be clear: Are we informing, consulting, or deciding? This distinction matters more than most people think. We’ve worked with teams where half the room thought they were being consulted and the other half thought a decision had already been made. The resulting frustration was entirely predictable.

Use frameworks like RACI or DACI to clarify roles. Though these are sometimes overkill and can just feel like bureaucratic overload – so don’t use things like this just for the sake of it or because you want to look all grown up.

Retrospectives

Ask simple but powerful questions:

What went well?

What could have been better?

What will we try differently next time?

Why Meetings Are a Cultural Signal

Every meeting sends messages about:

What is valued here?

How decisions are made here?

Whose voices matter here?

How safe it is to share dissent or half-formed ideas?

In this way, your meeting culture is your team culture, in miniature. Thoughtful, well-run meetings are a visible, tangible expression of healthy leadership. And poorly-run meetings? They’re an expression of something too, just not the kind most leaders want to admit to.

Learning More

To go deeper, explore these resources on people-shift.com:

• Brainwriting 365 and Variations: Some Facilitation Tools
• The Feedback Review Matrix

At PeopleShift, we often remind leaders: “Every meeting you run is a rehearsal for the culture you’re building.” Each meeting is also a chance to generate some great return on time investment, or alternatively if done badly, just a chance to pour that money down the drain while annoying your people. 

Like most of the things we say, it’s part of the job of leaders and managers to be intentional and meetings are a really important place to do that.