Recurring meeting
A meeting format held repeatedly on a fixed cycle, such as weekly or monthly.
A recurring meeting is a meeting held repeatedly on a fixed cycle, such as weekly / biweekly / monthly. Many organizations run them as a place for team information sharing, progress checks, and decision-making. According to a Harvard Business Review article (Stop the Meeting Madness, 2017), executives spend nearly 23 hours a week on average in meetings, a large increase from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.
Types and frequency of recurring meetings
| Type | Frequency | Purpose | Length |
|---|---|---|---|
| Daily stand-up | Daily | Sharing progress / spotting blockers early | 15 minutes |
| Team meeting | Once a week | Weekly review and planning | 30-60 minutes |
| Department meeting | 1-2 times a month | Information sharing across departments | 60 minutes |
| Company-wide meeting | Once a month / quarterly | Management policy / company-wide reports | 60-90 minutes |
Optimizing recurring meetings
Recurring meetings easily become empty formalities when continued out of inertia. It is important to review once a quarter whether “this meeting is really needed” and to decide to abolish meetings whose purpose has faded or reduce their frequency. Also, by sharing the agenda in advance and setting a rule to skip weeks with no topics, you can make good use of attendees’ time.
Properties unique to recurring meetings
Recurring meetings have two properties that one-off meetings do not. First, once set up, the decision to abolish them easily becomes no one’s job, so they tend to continue out of inertia even after the need has disappeared. Because a calendar’s repeat setting tends to work in the direction of “keep holding it,” it is effective to decide an end condition (at project completion / at the quarterly review) when setting it up. Second, in exchange for the scheduling cost being zero each time, the psychological hurdle to being absent / late also drops. A recurring meeting whose attendance has started to fall usually has a problem not of time slot but of need.