Monday Morning Team Meetings Suck
management, software development
Monday morning team meetings at 9:00am suck even more. Fortunately after ten weeks of 9am team meetings I’m moving my team meetings back to Tuesday at 10am.
For would be managers who are thinking about running team meetings on a Monday, my advice would be–don’t. A few reasons:
- Most people don’t show up to work Monday morning bright eyed and bushy tailed. They will typically tune out much of what you’re saying.
- I have to rush to prepare the agenda unless I was clever enough to put it together on Friday.
- I haven’t had my weekly staff meeting with my boss so most corporate stuff will be at least a few days old.
My experience over the ten weeks was average attendance was maybe 75% instead of closer to 90%. Often this was because 9am is when about half of my staff typically shows up since they are dropping off kids at school and such. I got very few questions and people looked happy when the 30 minute meeting finished early. I often felt ill prepared because I had to rush my prep for the meeting. It just takes a little while to ease into the work week for most humans.
Now that our 10 week security training is over I’m looking forward to a nice Tuesday staff meeting.
Ed Gibbs @ January 26, 2007
I do my meetings monday at 11am, gives them enough time to get in and wake up and gives me enough time to review my weekly status after the weekend has passed and wiped out the memories of the previous week! I like Mondays since it sets the stage for the week. If you do them on Tuesday you’re already 20% into the week that you’re trying to set goals for.
Good point. The 9am move added to the misery, but I have weekly meetings from 9:30 to 11:00 so Monday morning is just generally bad. I used to have Monday morning meetings at 10am when I started, but I found moving them to Tuesdays made things a lot more valuable.
Since all of my staff are generally working on Scrum projects with 30 day deliverables, they’re aren’t a lot of relevant weekly goals at a team levels, and I work with each one of them once a week on personal goals. The team meeting is generally to update them on all sorts of corporate stuff from financials to new annual review forms. Then there’s generally time for at least one agenda item we work on together like brainstorming ideas for how we work better with our QA department or myself or another developer gives a short demo on say cruisecontrol.