Have you ever attended a long meeting that could’ve been handled in a quick email? If you’re a working professional, chances are that you have. There are few worse feelings in corporate life than attending an unnecessary meeting while other necessary work nags at you. It’s likely why you can often find attendees working on other projects during meetings.
But as I learned, sometimes “pointless” meetings have a point.
In 2021, my company hired a second tech writer. I was more than happy to have help after so many years. But soon after her arrival, she invited me to a lot of pointless meetings. We started meeting with various teams on a monthly basis. The meetings tended to meander and end early. Often, members of the other team also seemed unsure about the meeting’s purpose.
About a year later, the purpose became clear.
I had been working to establish a Product-led wiki for some time. We met regularly with a member of the Client Success team to discuss their documentation needs on the wiki. That member was also the primary author behind a separate, Client Success-led wiki. After a year of meetings, he agreed to deprecate his wiki in favor of the Product wiki. I was stunned.
Immediately, I realized why we kept having these meetings. I could produce the best documentation in the world. But some work issues can’t be solved by better work output. To get this member of Client Success to abandon his brainchild of a wiki, we had to build trust.
We were meeting to build trust in the tech writing team, which would translate to trust in our documentation. Each meeting was an open forum for each team’s concerns. Sometimes, open forums are awkward. Sometimes, no one has topics to discuss. But they are necessary to build trust.
Once I came to this realization, the meetings became more engaging and more productive (and less awkward). I started prodding other teams more to ask questions and provide feedback. Eventually, they became more comfortable doing so. We formed stronger work relationships that helped us collaborate more effectively. Finally, our documentation improved to better serve their needs.
Meetings are chances to collaborate and build trust. When you find yourself in a “pointless” meeting, try imagining how you can use the meeting to build trust and work towards that. In doing so, you can turn the meeting into a productive one.