<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_yellow.svg" width="40px" /> This page is part of The Toolbox by Danny Smith.

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It's common for teams to use their regular meetings to share status updates, announcements and quick “how-to’s”. Since the goal of these is to convey information rather than interact with each other, they’re not usually the best use of our limited synchronous time. Status updates are important for members of a distributed team to feel in-the-loop and informed, though.

In an ideal world, we’d all be able to get these updates ourselves by looking at Slack, our project management tools, our dashboards etc. But in the real world stuff can often get missed this way, which is why many teams go back to doing this in their meetings.

One way to avoid this is to hold regular asynchronous “meetings”, where everyone contributes to and reads a document at roughly the same time every week (or month).

Besides freeing up synchronous meeting time and enabling the whole team to participate, doing this asynchronously opens up some opportunities that wouldn't work so well in synchronous meetings:

• We can divide the updates into small well-structured chunks, using text, video and graphics to convey our message – sometimes reading is easier than listening.
• We can spotlight someone from the team to share their learnings or tell stories of their success without trying to shoehorn it into a limited time slot.
• We can invite guests from other teams to share valuable knowledge or updates with the team, regardless of the time zone they're in.
• Larger teams will have room for each member to leave their work/personal update to be read/watched in full later. No more 30-second updates from 30 people.
• People can ask questions and provide answers without the pressure to perform that often comes with fast-paced synchronous meetings.

Structuring your status update “meeting”.

The main objective of these "meetings" is to communicate with clarity so that everyone is aligned and on the same page. They’re good for…

• Short updates from team members.
• Status updates on projects or tasks.
• Announcements.
• Deep dives or spotlights on certain work the team is doing.

You should create a template in a tool like Notion or FigJam with sections for the stuff above. Use it to create a document which you share it with the team a few days prior to your “meeting”.