A Daily Stand-Up is... All you Need?
At Nova, we experienced the fastest team growth during 2022, quickly reaching 50+ employees. On that journey, we decided to revisit our meetings amount and structure.
Welcome back to Talent First, after a one-week Easter break. In this edition, we are about to share our biggest “Aha moment” about the importance of communicating properly; that time when you realize that internal communication is… A THING, and you better start designing the proper processes and structure.
At Nova we have experienced the fastest team growth during 2022, we quickly reached the size of 50+ employees, and on that journey, we decided to revisit our internal approach to communication.
Summary
🔎 What did we learn about internal communication while growing the team rapidly? How do you run meetings more effectively, how do you communicate when you have teams in different locations and make sure everybody has access to the right information at the right time? Read further to learn about our journey on those topics.
A Daily Stand-Up is... All you Need?
We still have fresh in our minds those “easy mornings” we would meet all in person, in our little office in Madrid, and each one would go around the table with their priorities, roadblocks, and updates. It was as easy as internal communication can get, everyone is in the same room, with access to all the relevant information and with the ability to hash things out on the spot. 30 minutes and we were all aligned.
We underestimated the importance until it hit us: “Where did you say this” “When did we agree on this?” “Was this on Slack?” “Wow, did we reach 10K members?”
These reactions initially surprised us. We were naive, “Isn’t it enough to write something on a Slack channel? (on a free tier where they disappear) to inform people about things?” Well, obviously not. However, up until you have less than 10 you don’t bother thinking about the topic of internal communication. A daily stand-up is all you need, right?
As we reached 20 people, it was evident: we needed a proper communication infrastructure in place.
What, when, how, to whom, and WHY we communicate started to be more important than ever. This led us to upgrade our game to a level where today we can be proud of ourselves. We acknowledge that we still mess around sometimes but the failure is within an acceptable range.
So let us walk you through a month in Nova from an internal communication perspective.
What happens every week?
At Nova, Mondays are usually very packed with internal meetings, we prefer to get done and over with alignment on the first day, so everyone knows where to focus the rest of the week. On Monday we run different alignment meetings:
Management Team meeting: we have evolved the structure of this meeting many times over until we seem to have found a great return (see screenshot below). Each management session starts with a quick update on People and teams’ spirit, then moves to other announcements, and then it gets very tactical: we tackle a core topic that a manager has proposed—this week it was about the Nova Podcast (should we make it happen?).
The manager prepares reading materials and we use 30 minutes to spot hidden angles, and bottlenecks and together get to action points that can move that matter forward. We always talk about topics with high impact and urgency. The purpose is not to solve things in the meeting, but rather be of support, almost like an advisory board, to the ultimate owner of the matter. We love this format as it pushes the organization forward. In the past, we were spending too much time on just updates and informative reports, yet we love action. We found a sweet spot in this last version.
Functions and country alignment: as we run our company with a matrix organization, there is a line manager that is global and a country manager, we run 2 quick meetings, all focused on KPIs, action plans for the week, and roadblocks. It helps us keep the troops aligned and monitor our progress toward our KPIs and OKRs.
Managers have short 1-to-1 with their direct reports to focus on emotional safety, roadblocks, opportunities, and guidance.
Occasional deep dive on the most strategic priority with the cross-functional squad in charge of the challenge.
What happens every month?
Townhall meeting (our favorite): celebrate victories and the champions, radical transparency to all our employees on financials (revenues, EBITDA, cash), strategic initiatives, AND the most awaited moment: the SUN of the month. Employees spontaneously share their best moments from their month at Nova. I have many of those recorded for the memory lane.
Country Strategy meeting: here we review the monthly results and each person shares their KPIs results, ideas for improvements, and bottlenecks. We like to see our people, regardless of seniority, feel strong ownership of their KPIs, so they present them together with potential reasons for underperformance.
What happens every quarter and every year?
Every quarter we review our OKRs and set new objectives for the starting one.
On an annual basis, we meet once offline, the entire company at what we call the Big Bang Conference usually in Q4 to celebrate the year’s accomplishments and align about the year ahead and the online digital kick-off in January
Listing them all might seem too many but if you run them with clear intentions and goals, it contributes significantly to the organization’s clarity. We have monitored this metric for many quarters now and we have a consistent score of 9 on “alignment around the company vision and goals” in our employees survey.
How do we effectively run meetings?
So the last piece to the puzzle is, how do we effectively run meetings so they don’t become a waste of everyone’s time?
This realization came in one particular meeting where about 10 people were listening to a presentation and realized that “this could have been an email”. Right after that, we discussed how to reduce meetings’ passive time so we make them shorter and results-oriented. This is when, Amazon once again, came to support. As you might know, Amazon is famous for not running meetings via slides but via detailed and informative memos which everyone read before going into the discussion. We loved that principle and therefore tried to run it the same way ourselves at Nova.
Today, all our company meetings happen via Notion cards, which have been previously filled in by all the involved parties so when we go to the meeting they already contain all the required information. We start the meetings with 10 minutes of silence — it still feels weird at times, during that time we make sure attendees read the memo and leave questions in the document and once Everyone has finished reading we jump into the discussion.
Some meetings run for just 15 minutes, because everyone has understood and no further questions arise, some others turn into long and very valuable debates as everyone has a very detailed knowledge of the context and can better contribute rather than just listening.
Even brainstorming sessions that become a wild set-up of crazy ideas, often start with reading the problem statements and context.
Now, after more than 1 year of running all our meetings this way, we can say it has been a worthwhile effort to educate all our people about the importance of meetings.
The more obvious benefits are:
Anyone can asynchronously access meeting memos, and read and leave comments even if they were off during that day. We foster better participation and information flow but also make our work routines more friendly in case of time-zone differences etc.
We don’t waste anyone’s time, when we meet we have a purpose, a context, and a clear agenda.
We reduce information asymmetry. Even the newly joined teammates can grab a lot of contextual information and participate in the debate.
We hope that you can bring some insights and inspiration with you out of our take on internal communications. We’d love to hear your thoughts, does this seem too much to you? How are you running meetings in your organization and what can we learn from you? Let us know over LinkedIn or in the comments below.
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