What do you do for Staff Meetings? – DSP 106

Staff meetings are one of those things for float centers that are just a bit more inconvenient than some other places of business. Especially if that float center is open 24 hours a day like Float On is.

In this episode, Graham and Ashkahn talk about how they run meetings, what they think is important to cover, how frequently they happen, and the ideal location for holding them (it’s possible that the shop is too pleasant and inviting to move quickly from one topic to the next).

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “What kind of meetings do you hold with your crew?”

Ashkahn: How about some history first?

Graham: Meetings began as a human concept.

Ashkahn: So, we started with no meetings. That was our initial plan.

Graham: And it went… okay.

Ashkahn: We have some meetings now, but we basically didn’t want to just have meetings for meeting’s sake. So we started by assuming maybe we don’t need meetings at all.

Graham: There weren’t a ton of us at the beginning, so that was actually a little more manageable.

Ashkahn: We made it a while without having any formal weekly meeting or anything like that. That’s kind of always our goal with meetings, you should really be thinking about, are these important? Is each one important, because there’s just so many people there. You’re wasting so many people’s collective time if you’re having pointless meetings, and payroll in addition to that.

I actually know of one company here in Portland that’s a pastry shop. They have a weekly meeting and they do it in their walk-in freezer to encourage everyone to keep the meeting as short as possible.

Graham: Awesome.

Ashkahn: Which I think is amazing. That’s the kind of mentality I like to think about with meetings.

Graham: I don’t know if I’ve heard that story before.

Ashkahn: It’s awesome.

Graham: The walk-in freezer meeting length is absolutely how you should be thinking about this. That’s brilliant. We should get a walk-in freezer just for our meetings.

Ashkahn: Now at this point for our float center, we basically have two types of meetings. We have one meeting that’s kind of for everybody, everyone in the whole staff.

Graham: And we’re doing that about once a month.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so once a month on the night of one of our deep-clean days, we’re holding that meeting. Even that is not quite as frequent as once a month in the way that it sounds, which is that … Because of the nature of running a float center, and the fact that people have different shifts and they’re working different times, and some of them have other jobs, and not everyone’s working at the same time, it makes it pretty difficult.

You’re not like an office, where it’s like, “Okay, everyone, let’s just get together in the conference room at 10:00 AM,” or whatever like that. So, for us to have everyone in the same room at the same time is a little bit difficult to pull off. We were finding it even once a month still hard to pull off. People just couldn’t make it for one reason or another.

Graham: Yeah, previous commitments and, again, all of our cleaning days are on the same day, which is Monday. So, if you are that person who has a Monday commitment that you need to go to, then you’re also the one who never shows up to our monthly meeting.

We kind of figured that once every quarter feels like an alright amount of time to actually mandate that, even if you have other responsibilities, you still need to, instead of canceling on our shop meeting, cancel on those other responsibilities and show up for this.

We have a decent turnout for our regular monthly meetings, and once every three months is sort of an all hands on deck, drop whatever the heck you were doing other than this and come on in type of meeting.

Ashkahn: Yep. And these meetings were basically … One, we’re talking through some more just complex issues. If we’re trying to figure out something that we want to do with the shop, and it’s a bit of a bigger conversation, that just goes so much faster when everyone’s in person. You don’t have to wait for a comment and then, another hour later, someone else will put their feedback in. Everyone’s standing around and the conversation can move so much quicker with everybody else in the same room.

So, we’ll leave big complicated issues to tackle during the meetings, and also make our biggest announcements or specifically things that are changing, significant changes in our shop, and actually talk through the kind of all the little weird consequences that come every time you change anything that’s big.

Graham: Yeah, we’ve decided to give a free rubber ducky to every customer, for example, and all of a sudden you need to know where the rubber ducky store supply is, and how you’re presenting that rubber ducky when you hand it out. There’s inevitably a lot of questions about varying sizes of rubber duckies, and-

Ashkahn: Yeah, as one small example.

So, that’s usually the content of our meetings. There’s something like that, and other times we’ll talk about people’s strategies for selling memberships. We’ve even had people give their little membership pitches and stuff like that, or we’ve had our crew give walkthroughs to everybody else.

Things to make sure that everyone’s staying on the same page as one another, is another thing we’ll try to take advantage of when we have everyone together in a room.

Graham: It just hasn’t really come up that much over the last little bit, which I guess is a good sign for our shop, but just an airing of grievances, as well. A chance for everyone to be together.

If two people hang their pool noodles differently in the rooms, then everyone else on staff … As small as that sounds, sometimes that can actually become a little point of frustration, so these meetings are a nice place for everyone to get on the same page for just little pet peeves, or bigger issues that people have noticed, too, and actually have a productive conversation about it with everyone around.

Ashkahn: Right. Stuff like that is just way better to do in person.

Graham: Way better.

Ashkahn: Because over online communication or written communication, it’s just really hard to not end up with passive-aggressive comments, or people misinterpreting the tone, and-

Graham: Anything but in person ends up with some bigger form of white board aggression, that I’ve had in any shared house that I had, where the white board, I felt like, just eventually damaged relationships that I had with people living with me. When you can’t see someone’s face, it’s just so much harder to take hard things the right way.

Ashkahn: We’ve taken advantage of that at our meetings for a couple different things.

Graham: These will last for about two hours, our monthly meetings.

Ashkahn: We have pizza and beer, and other food, and stuff like that, so it’s not hopefully the least enjoyable thing in the world.

Graham: Actually we call them work parties, but I don’t think that our staff is fooled.

Ashkahn: No, so far no one’s been inviting their other friends, like, “Hey, we’re going to a work party.”

Graham: Then we also have a manager, or really anyone in our shop with advanced responsibilities, meeting. That’s once a week?

Ashkahn: Yeah, they’ll get together once a week, and that’s just much more like, “Hey, what have we got to do this week? What do we need to figure out? Who needs to order something? What’s going wrong? What do we need to fix this deep-clean day?” It’s just all the logistical, tactical stuff that needs to be sorted. That’s generally what those meetings are.

Graham: Yep, and those are shorter, usually about an hour maybe, or less.

Outside of that, everything with our crew is done either through the Helm, with communication just with our logbooks and on tasks, and stuff like that. There’s tons of chatter going back and forth.

Ashkahn: Yeah, every day. Ton of communication just free-flowing.

Graham: Some kind of way for that to happen. Communication in the background. Even if someone’s not in the shop, for them to be able to … even if it’s a Google doc that you have going. It’s a running doc of comments that people have left, that’s also useful. But some way to fill in all of these gaps between meetings is necessary, not just to have a meeting every single day.

Ashkahn: Oh yeah, it would be crazy if you didn’t have some sort of … You need some sort of centralized communication place for people to know that’s where they go for information, to make sure they know everything that’s going on, and it’s where they can put information to make sure everybody sees it.

If you don’t have a place that everyone trusts, is something that everybody is reading and contributing to, then everything’s going to be way … I don’t know if any amount of meetings is going to solve that problem for you.

Graham: Yeah, and it’s compounded, too. I think you alluded to this at the beginning, Ashkahn, but the fact that people working the shop are working such different shifts, as well. You rarely have more than two, or maybe three, people in a float center, sometimes just one by themselves, depending on the size of it.

Which means, all of this type of communication, outside of just when you’re actually at your job, becomes that much more important. It’s not like everyone’s clocking in at 9:00 AM and everyone’s leaving at 5:00, and if you need to have a conversation with someone, you can wander over to their office or something like that, right?

So, you need the soft device to fill in all the communication gaps that you have there.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Also, meetings are expensive. You want them to be efficient. You want to be talking about the things that are best suited to talking in person, and leave all the little details that can be done online, to just be done while people are working their shifts.

Graham: And so, because we have such a good method of written and ongoing communication, I think that’s why we’re able to get by with just having our one monthly meeting, our one quarterly mandatory meeting, and the weekly shop manager meeting.

Outside of that, I think it’s just one-offs. People calling meetings with some other staff they’re collaborating with a project on, or one-on-one meetings, small employee check-ins, things like that. No other big, full-crew meetings that I can think of.

Ashkahn: No. Once a year, we’ll try to go have a big party, do something actually fun.

Graham: He means an actual party, yeah.

Ashkahn: A real work party, yeah.

Graham: That’s great. There are a lot of activities our staff does outside, as well, but that’s straying from the full meeting question.

Ashkahn: Yeah. Cool.

Graham: So, that’s it.

Ashkahn: If you guys have other questions for us, you can go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

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