How Often Should I Meet With My Team?
First-time founders and managers navigating remote work sometimes ask themselves how often they should sync or meet with their teams. It’s a hard question to answer because so many variables are involved.
The inputs, or things to consider, are the skill levels of you and your report for the task at hand, you and your report’s level of extroversion, and the priority and complexity of the project that’s underway.
The outputs of the function are the frequency and intensity of your syncs.
There’s no single answer, but my rules of thumb go something like this.
Input variables:
Task Type: Squishy vs Repeatable
Repeatable tasks could be sales calls, customer support calls, and the funnels they feed into. Those are measurable, and you can wire up a system to track the metrics through a dashboard. You would sync if something is clearly going wrong, or to get additional color beyond the metrics, or to brainstorm on how things could be improved.
Squishy tasks could include setting up a new system, or trying to solve an existing problem in a new way (or a new problem in a new way!). Data science is full of squishy tasks, where you need to explore data, discover the shape of your problem, ideate on a solution, implement it, and measure the results. While you can track each of those steps and measure the time each step takes, discovering problems and ideating on solutions is not as predictable a process as making sales calls.
Task Priority: High vs Medium
Self-explanatory
Manager’s/Direct Report’s Competence: High vs low on a given task
In startups, scrappy people have to tackle tasks for which they have little to no experience. So good people may be performing tasks where they have low competence, because the alternative is that nothing gets done at all. Sometimes, people are only momentarily low competence, because you’re onboarding them, or they’re setting up a new system (which will later run on its own.) If their competence level doesn’t change over time on the same task, then there’s a deeper problem to solve than how frequently you sync.
Manager’s/Direct Report’s Extroversion: High vs low (usually applies across tasks)
Either you/they get energy and momentum from bouncing ideas around live, or you/they don’t. A lot of creatives (UX design, content, etc.) produce better work when discussing it regularly with others. I would say it’s the duty of managers to either hire direct reports who match their preferred level of extroversion, or adapt to the extroversion their reports need, since it’s the manager’s job to maximize the reports’ output.
Output variables:
Sync Frequency: High vs low
Sync Intensity (bandwidth and detail): High vs low
e.g. f2f meeting where you dig deep vs. updating a spreadsheet with data
High frequency, low bandwidth “syncs” could be a dashboard that updates metrics every few hours. It could also be bullet points you share on Slack every day marking progress.
Low frequency, high bandwidth syncs could be a 30-min call each week.
High frequency, high bandwidth could be the daily call you do with people solving problems on the critical path, to discuss blockers and brainstorm on how to move faster.
For example:
Squishy + high priority task = frequent syncs
Repeatable, well understood, medium-priority tasks = passive monitoring via dashboards
Direct report has high task competence + introversion = Slack updates
Direct Report has low task competence + extroversion = more frequent, higher-bandwidth interactions
Default to more communication if you feel uncertainty about whether something important will get done well and on time.
More broadly, I think remote-first teams can be more fragile than in-office teams, because a lot of information is no longer shared automatically via the environment of the workplace. You have to be more deliberate.
In that spirit, it’s helpful to schedule 1:1’s every week or two with all direct reports just to make sure I’m not missing anything. In a remote-first company, this is the closest you’ll get to “management by walking around.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_wandering_around
Every team has something on the critical path. For people leading those efforts, you should be on a call with them every day, sometimes a few times a day.
A manager’s job is to set culture through communication and clarity, and to show commitment to their team and customers. Regular, high-bandwidth interaction is a great way to do that.