How to Establish Meeting Norms for your Organization
This conversation with Nupur Amin focuses on how organizations should develop and implement norms and expectations around how meetings are conducted.
Organizational meeting norms can have an outsized impact on creating a culture of equity and inclusion, where all voices are heard and treated equally. Despite this, many organizations have not taken steps to establish these types of norms, often because they don’t have clarity on the process to develop and implement these policies.
Nupur is the Business Development and Outreach Manager at Habitus where she serves as a trainer, mediator, and coach. Nupur’s main functions include designing and leading training , managing clients, and doing business outreach to discover new opportunities for collaboration ensuring Habitus’ mission of making their content accessible and available to organizations doing meaningful work in the areas of climate action and social justice.
We’re lucky to have Nupur’s perspective on how organizations can go about setting meeting norms. In her role at Habitus, Nupur has worked on these issues with a variety of businesses. Gender IDEAL’s Founder & CEO Flory Wilson recently talked with Nupur about how organizations can get started on establishing meeting norms.
Flory Wilson: Nupur, tell us why does having an organization wide set of meeting norms have impact on the inclusion and culture of an organization?
Nupur Amin: It has a huge impact for a couple of reasons; one is that time and attention are both really important resources that we don't often think about, especially when we're running meetings and when we're in meetings. But there's a disproportionate amount of airtime that's taken up by men, by white people, and by people that are higher up on the hierarchy ladder. When it comes to workplace culture, this creates a really uneven dynamic about whose ideas are being heard.
There are so many times that I've sat in a meeting or I've consulted on meetings where it has been run by someone who is an executive or a C-suite member. They're commanding a lot of the power in the meeting, and they ask for opinions. And usually there is an opinionated white man, or an opinionated executive who wants to share what their thoughts are and talk about what decision they should make. And that's great, those opinions are important to hear, but also, those are not the opinions that are hard for us to hear.
It's really important in meeting spaces to say, “What are the opinions that if we don't create the space for them now, we otherwise won’t hear. What are the insights we might miss and how can we elevate those? How can we get that information first?” There should always be awareness that if you make a decision without those opinions, you are inevitably going to have to go back and get those opinions later when there's a negative impact.
So why wouldn't you structure your meetings, facilitate your conversations in a way where you're not doing double the work? That's the first thing. The second thing is that I think having strong inclusive meeting norms positively impacts productivity. A lot of people associate how much work that gets done in a meeting with productivity, but the other association that I want to encourage people to think about is , and there's less cleanup. We forget how much of our time and energy we spend on fixing the impacts of decisions that we made from a lack of inclusive voices. And that can be remedied by implementing these norms.
Flory: That is a very compelling case. I'm convinced meeting norms are a good thing! Let's talk about what this looks like in action. What are the key components of an effective policy that an organization implements as it relates to meeting practices?
Nupur: There are a couple of different policies. The first is really making sure that effort is equalized across the board. What do I mean by that? When we're running meetings, we see very often that meetings are run by managers, C-suite members, executives – people at higher level positions of the company. And oftentimes they are allowed – just by the pure structure of the power and hierarchy – to come into meetings without a well thought agenda, without a plan for facilitation, without a significant amount of preparation. Whereas if you are a young employee, if you're a new employee, if you are a female or person of color, there is a lot more cultural pressure to have all of those things sorted out; to have a grasp on every aspect of the meeting. And it's really important to kind of equalize that responsibility. Because if you think about meetings in your company, if you're watching this and you resonate on one or the other side of the scale, think about why we make those allowances, what justifies saying, “Oh, you're a manager, you can come to a meeting without an agenda. You can come to a meeting without telling anybody what the meeting is going to be about what we're expected to do. You can run it however you want.” Why do we make those allowances?
The second thing is there should always be a structure to how meetings are run within an organization. Organizational structures can look different depending on the company. Part of what we do at Habitus is help people understand what that structure can work for their organization. What are the challenges that you face at your company and how can those challenges be resolved through norms. The fact remains that there should always be a structure and everyone should have to follow it regardless of their position and identity. If you are making a commitment to a norm, it applies from the CEO to an intern and everybody needs to use it the same way.
When we think about meeting norms at Habitus, one of the strategies we use for meeting structures is called the four P's model. you don't have to apply them the same way other companies might apply them. You don't have to say, ‘Oh no, this is the way that Habitus uses it and we must use it the exact same way’. Think about what the process does for you and how you're going to apply it. So purpose, product, people and process is the model that we use. We start by saying, “What is the purpose of this meeting? Why are we meeting here today? The facilitator's job is to communicate what the purpose is. The product is what we are hoping to get out of this meeting before we all log off? What do we want to leave with – this can be the tangible or intangible product, a list of brainstorming ideas, a decision on X problem, a list of advice from every team member. What is the product?
Next is people. Who are the people involved? Who is at this meeting and what are their roles? One thing that goes wrong often in meetings is people show up to meetings not knowing what their role in that meeting is. “Am I a decision maker? Am I an advisor? Am I just here to observe? What is my role?” Communicating each person’s role is important. Finally there is process, which is essentially your agenda. ‘We have these three things that we want to achieve in our meeting, but how are we going to achieve them? How are we allocating our time in the meeting?’ etc. That's the process.
Habitus starts every meeting by the facilitator sharing these four things out loud, and in a document so that everyone can see. And so that's one example of how we might use it.
Flory: A couple of things that I want to clarify. First on meeting norms, do they have to be written down? Is this a policy that needs to live in the policy handbook? What's your advice to most companies on how to make sure that it is implemented equally.
Nupur: I think it depends on the culture of the company. For example, smaller companies might still be figuring out what their company culture is and they might want to try some things. Once something goes in a policy handbook, people have a lot of resistance to changing it. So my advice is, don't put it in your handbook until you have tried it, tested it, amended it, and gotten opinions and feedback.
The process of creating great meeting norms is to iterate and iterate until you find something that feels like it's just part of the company culture. And then once you're at that point, great, put it in the handbook or write it down or put it in your charter. I do advise when you're first starting to create norms that the norm be written somewhere. They can refer to it, but it doesn't have to be in the handbook until it's ready to be in the handbook.
Flory: The second thing you mentioned is the facilitator when you were talking about roles and how meetings run. Can you talk a little bit more about the facilitator?
Nupur: Sure. So in the meeting, we talked about the decision makers, the advisors, the observers. There are two other roles that are important. One is the convener, and the convener is the person that says, ‘Hey, we need to have a meeting’. And it could be a manager saying, ‘We need to have a meeting so we can check in on this project’. It could be a team member saying, ‘We need to have a meeting. I need some advice’- whatever it may be. The person that calls the meeting is the convener.
Oftentimes, the convener and the facilitator are the same person, but they don't necessarily have to be. The facilitator is the person who designs the meeting. They are the person who goes through thinking about the four P's, if there's any pre-work or post- work and communicating that to the team. And within the meeting, the facilitator is the one whose job it is to make sure they're hearing from the right people, that they're managing the time, that they're managing the dynamics in the room. Oftentimes we think about facilitation as a person whose job is to keep track of time. But there's a lot of facilitation in saying “Here's what we're doing, here's how we're doing it. And I want to make sure we hear from a variety of people. Flory, I'm going to call on you first then Sam then Jessica, etc, etc.” So managing that process is also the facilitation role.
Flory: Are there ever instances in which it's not a good idea for the convener to be the facilitator. Do you have guidance on when a convener might want to opt to not be the facilitator?
Nupur: If there's a distinct power structure in place. The facilitator’s job is both to manage the room but also to serve as an anchor point in a meeting. If you're in an organization where there is a very clear power distribution, having a high power person or having the high powered convener also be the facilitator, in some cases might be risky because people might be reluctant to push back or they might be reluctant to say, “I understand you put this on the agenda, but I'm not sure why” or “I know that you want to spend 10 minutes doing this, but I actually think we should spend 15 minutes doing this other thing in order to help us do this.”
A huge part of running good meetings is both having a plan for the meeting and then understanding that you might have to shuffle the plan. We find that the people who are comfortable pushing back on authority are other members of authority. People that are white and people that are men have the highest pushback rates. And that's not the kind of balance that you want because that means that there might be another person who has a great idea or sees a hole in the agenda or in the process that has been outlined for the meeting and is too uncomfortable to push back because the facilitator has too much authority.
Having a facilitator also be the key decision maker is also tricky, especially if the facilitator’s role is to collect opinions, advice, questions, push back, but they are the one who ultimately makes the decision. Sometimes you can't avoid it. The decision maker calls the meeting because they want input in making a decision. And that's totally fine. But in that event, really making sure you say “I need to make a decision about x. I want your insight because I want it to be equitable. I want everyone to feel comfortable, you're all serving as advisors. I would love your thoughts and insights and based on what you say, I will ponder and then go make the decision.”
Flory: That makes sense. At my prior organization, we also realized there were some people who were just very talented facilitators, and when we knew we were going into a meeting that was going to be more challenging, even if that person was in on a different team, we would ask them to come in and facilitate to ensure neutrality in that facilitator role. These were people who were not afraid to kind of call people out, you know, speak truth to power to ensure equity in the meeting. I would think if within an organization, people are identified as being particularly skilled at facilitating, those are good people to then rely on over time.
Nupur: Absolutely. The more high stakes the meeting, the more you want to make sure you're using a skilled facilitator. Whether you bring one in externally or use somebody else from another team, or you assign it to someone on the team, they will spend time prepping for it. Because otherwise we come back to that idea of cleaning up our mess.
Flory: So what advice would you give an organization on how to successfully roll out meeting norms?
Nupur: I have kind of a sequence of advice. First, if you were designing a meeting norm and it's new and you're trying it out for your team or your organization, you want to start by doing some intake. By intake I mean talk to people at different levels of the organization. Make sure you understand what their meetings look like and what norms might they be looking for, what makes meetings challenging for them. You want to talk to anyone who might be impacted by your decision.
I think a mistake that we make often is we say, “I want to implement this norm” and we check in with other people at our level and say, “What do you think about this? I have this great idea. Do you think we should do it?” They say, “Yeah, it's a great idea”. But you haven't checked in with the people who are going to be impacted by your norm. Later you're back to doing cleanup. What you want to do is say, “Okay, I have an idea for a norm and in order to figure out what the right one is, I'm going to have one meeting with three people from each team in our organization. I'm going to see what challenges they are facing when they're in their meetings. What do they wish was different about their meetings? And ask them the question, if you were setting a new meeting norm, what meeting norm would you pick?”
People's answers tell you a lot about the direction that they're hoping the meetings take. So first, do the intake and that helps you get a landscape for where you should go. Once you do that, you want to draft a norm and make it clear in the draft what challenges you're trying to address. Because again, coming back to the commitments that we make to other people, if I come to you as part of my intake and you tell me a challenge and I've drafted something that doesn't address that, It is my responsibility to tell you why I've done that.
If people don't understand what a norm does, they're going to be very hesitant to implement it. Especially because implementing new meeting norms is time consuming. Sometimes it takes more effort on the part of people who have been relatively low effort before the norm was in place. Sometimes people are reluctant to change because it makes them feel nervous, whatever it may be. Say that you are setting a norm, because you've heard that a lot of people don't have space to talk in meetings, or a lot of people don't have space to share their opinion or that you have a lot of people in the company or a few people in the company who are very opinionated and talkative and bold, and so they take up a lot of airtime. Right? So saying, “Okay, we want to make sure that when we're in our meetings, we hear from everybody who is being impacted. So in our weekly meetings, we're going to have a theme, we're going to have a question, we're going to ask about a project and then we're going to go around and have everybody give their thoughts, their insights, etc. And what we're hoping this will do is lead to a more robust brainstorming, lead to space being created for more voices to be heard.” But you're saying ‘Here's the problem. Here's how we're proposing we solve it. And here's what we think the outcome will be’. And that is how you want to communicate what the norm will be to your team.
Remember if there's a draft, then it is your job to make sure you get the input on the draft before you implement it. So you want to have an open invite round table, an open meeting, a lunch and discussion, whatever it may be, where everyone is invited. ‘Here's a draft of the norm, come give us your feedback. Tell us what's missing, tell us what you like, what you don't like’ and take rigorous notes.
Once you've done that, you want to edit your draft one more time, and you want to let people know what your timeline is so that they can share feedback. “We're hoping to implement this on June 1. So if you could take a look at the final version by May 20. And let us know by May 20 if you have any concerns, if you have any doubts.” Communicate the timeline so people don't feel slighted by the fact that you made a draft or made a final version and they didn't get to have a final input or say in your amendments.
And then the very last piece is you want to set a duration to test it. It's a bad idea to say ‘This is our new meeting norm forever’ because who knows if it's going to work, who knows what you're going to learn as you implement it. Who knows if you solve the right problem or not. And so creating a norm and saying, “Alright, now that the team has weighed in on the drafts, and we have one that we feel good about. We want to commit to these meeting norms for two months. And at the end of two months, we'll all come together for another open roundtable to discuss how it went.” and then “What's your feedback? What adjustments should we make?” And that's the process through which I would recommend implementing a new new norm and making sure that you have the right voices heard as you're creating it.
Flory: So what you're saying is establish a clear timeline. We're going to test it for this period of time and then we're going to evaluate it and tweak it as needed.
Nupur: Yeah, absolutely. And I will say that tracking objective standards for measuring positive impact is a really dangerous goal to have. And it's because there are no objective standards to say if a meeting norm is working for your organization or not. When I explain that to clients I talk a lot about “Think of it as you're cooking a meal for your family. Right, and there are some basic things that you should know about cooking a meal. It shouldn't be too salty, it shouldn't be burnt, etc, etc. But other than that, there's all kinds of different things that make a meal good for different families. Some families need really spicy food, some families want everything cooked well done. Some families have dietary restrictions or allergies. And if you don't understand the makeup of what your family needs, what your team needs, then it doesn't matter what works for other people, you're not going to make a meal that they like.”
And so making sure that the impact of meeting norms feels the same, like cooking a meal. When you draft your meeting norms in the beginning, one of the questions you want to ask is ‘how will we know if this is working? What is our metric of success going to be?’ And your team should be a part of determining what those metrics are.
Flory: A lot of the organizations that we work with at Gender IDEAL are smaller with maybe 100 employees. Is there any kind of specific advice or guidance that you would give to smaller organizations?
Nupur: I think determining new meeting norms while an organization is small is a huge advantage. If you're a small organization, start now, take advantage of your size now. It gives you more time to hear from a range of people, to workshop ideas and to get granular input. And one day you will end up putting it in your policy handbook, right? Then the only thing you have to worry about later is scaling.
At some point a norm feels like part of the blood flow of an organization, it feels natural, we all understand how it works. And when you're at that point, you've kind of found your norm. Start small, don’t overwhelm yourself. Because it's like building a new habit. You want to set small, attainable goals. You want to give yourself positive reinforcement. Just trying out one norm and having one norm work well will really motivate your team and your morale more than having three norms or five norms and only having one of them work well.
Flory: That's such good advice. I have one final question for you. What's your most favorite meeting norm? I'll go first. This was something that we did at my prior employer when we did a lot of virtual meetings. We would start off each meeting with a check-in question. One team had decided that starting with a check-in question allowed everyone to kind of ground themselves in the meeting and the group and it also allowed people to share how they were feeling in that moment. We’d take five minutes doing this at the beginning but what I found was the meetings were far more effective because we kind of all knew where we were coming from.
Nupur: My favorite practice at Habitus is having staggered meetings. There's a huge culture of ‘when you set a meeting it’s set to an hour, or set it to 30 minutes’, regardless of what's on the agenda. At Habitus we’ll have a team meeting that's set for an hour, but the facilitator will take a look at the agenda that they've planned and they'll say, ‘Oh, actually, you know, for the first 20 minutes of the meeting, we're making a decision on marketing and so we need the marketing team for only 20 minutes. Come for the first 20 minutes and then we'll let you go afterwards’.That is a really nice feeling both for productivity and for building trust within teams.
Flory: I want to thank you so much for your time today. You and your colleagues at Habitus do great work helping to build organizational culture. I thank you for your time and your expertise.