345. How I run my remote team meetings 🙌
Learn how I create team meetings that people actually like (I think). Slides, agenda, topics, and more.
Hi there 👋
The past couple weeks of newsletters have been focused on strategic planning, an exercise I’m sure a lot of us find ourselves doing these days. This week’s newsletter takes strategic planning in a bit of a different direction: how you stay connected to your teams through your all-team meetings. Read all the way to the end for a new way to join this conversation in the Substack app. 🍿
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
How I run my remote team meetings
One of the most valuable spots on my calendar is the one hour I get with my marketing team every two weeks.
It’s an expensive meeting (there are 50 of us, which means 50 work-hours spent on a Zoom), but these meetings are critical for building team camaraderie, disseminating important information, and celebrating our wins together. I’ve mentioned before how I like to build my teams on a foundation of trust, respect, and affirmation. The team meeting is a chance for me to reinforce it.
Before you begin, choose the cadence and length.
We’ll get into the meeting specifics in a minute, but first things first:
How often are you going to meet?
How long will your meetings be?
There’re a lot of great articles about the best rituals to set with your team (this is one of my favorites). But the truth of the matter is that your operating cadence will be unique to your team. Since we aspire to be an asynchronous workplace at Oyster, I felt that anything more frequent than 2x per month would be too much. And then given how much content there was to cover each time, 30 minutes didn’t seem long enough.
So we meet every two weeks for one hour. The meeting is scheduled at 8:00am San Francisco / 11:00am New York / 4:00pm London / 9:30pm Mumbai / 3:00am Sydney. 😱 💤
(We don’t currently have any Sydney-timezone teammates at Oyster, but in the past, I would alternate my meeting times so that one would be more friendly to APAC timezones.)
Ok, on to the meeting agenda!
For a glance at the overall structure of the meetings, here’s a sample slide deck that I used at a past Oyster marketing standup. I’ve removed & blurred some of the specific bits, but I think you get the picture.
(I also make all of my presentations in Pitch, which has some truly amazing templates for marketing standups in particular.)
1. Set the mood with some music.
I start all my team meetings with some music so that no one is joining the call to silence, awkward or otherwise. This tip came from our company all-hands, and it makes a surprisingly big difference. It sets a great tone for the meeting, and if nothing else, gives people the impression that I’ve thought ahead about how we’ll use our time.
To play music on a Zoom, follow these steps:
Click Share Screen
Check the box in the bottom left-hand corner for “Share Sound”
2. Share the agenda
There are few things more anxiety-inducing for me than joining a 60-minute call that has no agenda. So I always begin with a quick overview of what we’ll discuss together.
3. Don’t forget to record!
What does it say about me that I need to put a slide into my slide deck specifically as a reminder to press record?
Oh well. It works! I record for anyone who can’t make it — either because of scheduling, vacation, timezones, etc. Then we have a place in our company’s Notion where I keep a library of all past meeting records.
Bonus tip: I’ve played around with recording tools like TL;DV and Grain, which do an amazing job of timestamping your video and creating clips … which are way easier to watch than a full 60-minute zoom recording.
4. Housekeeping
My housekeeping includes a number of different, random things from standup to standup. In general, it’s a mist of recurring items and one-off, timely announcements like:
Welcoming new teammates
Announcing open roles (and asking the team to amplify within their networks)
Celebrating work anniversaries
Checking out the marketing calendar
Reminders about company-wide surveys and important news
5. Review the numbers and (most importantly) where to find them
It wouldn’t be a marketing meeting without at least some mention of our goals and KPIs. I’ve done this in a couple of different ways, both a deep dive, granular view of our OKR performance and also a quick peek at our high-level marketing dashboard. Either one works, so long as you are building a habit of accountability and visibility for your numbers.
Most importantly, I strive for repetition with where my team should look to see our results. For the past 52+ standups, this has meant my pointing out our marketing dashboard in Looker.
On a remote team, this type of reinforcement is really necessary so that the team can self-serve with their metrics rather than waiting for the next standup to know how things are going.
6. Appreciations
Every standup, I make time for the team to grab the mic and share a shout-out to another teammate for great work they’ve seen, help they’ve received, or anything they’ve appreciated from one of their marketing peers. It’s a very sweet and special time. I have almost cried once or twice.
We’re now trying to tie these appreciations back to our company values, which is another neat way to reinforce broader ideas within the team.
7. Team photo
Like it or not, my team has been kind to indulge me in taking a Zoom screenshot during our meeting, typically with us doing something weird or funny. We’ll spell out a teammate’s name, we’ll all put on weird Zoom filters, we’ll do unique poses.
I’ll share the photos in Slack afterward and attach them to our Notion notes for safe keeping. The idea is that these photos can be a fun way to feel like part of a team, and the team can use them however they want (perhaps to share on social, saying how great this team is??).
8. Show-and-tell (5-10 mins)
A couple days before the team meeting, I’ll do an open call for volunteers to do a show-and-tell during the meeting. A show-and-tell is a ten-minute share about something unique to that person’s life at work or at home. Most often, this has meant teammates sharing about a new work project or giving a peek into the day-to-day of their role. But we’ve also had teammates share about things like volunteering outside of work. I shared about my family’s flower farm.
The intent is for this to be a low-lift way to include other voices in the standup and to allow people the space to elevate their work in front of their peers.
9. Deep dive (20-30 mins)
Deep dives are a more robust version of the show-and-tell. These tend to be topic-based or channel-based. For instance, we would do a deep dive on our SEO strategy, or I would share a deep dive on our 2023 annual plans.
Here’s the short list of ideas I’ve kept for deep dive topics
Marketing strategy
Channel strategy
“How we work”
Inviting special guests for AMAs
Quarterly planning
Since the timeframe here is at least 20 minutes, I try to make the deep dives interactive, whether that’s through Q&A or surveys or through collaboration on a Miro board or breakout rooms.
10. Fun time
I like to think that there’s plenty of fun to be had in all of the above meeting items, but yes, we do set aside time for intentional fun with the team. We have a recurring “meet the team” segment where two teammates interview each other. We play games like Jeopardy, Family Feud, and Codenames. In fact, we’ve created a whole “fun squad” within the team just to come up with fun ideas like this.
How do you run a remote meeting? Join me in my new subscriber chat & share your thoughts …
This week Substack rolled out a brand new feature for its newsletter communities (like this one). We have our very own subscriber chat where we can talk to each other!
This is a conversation space in the Substack app (iOS-only for now, but Android is coming). It’s exclusively for my subscribers — kind of like a group chat or live hangout. Over the next few weeks I’d like to test it out by posting short prompts, thoughts, and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Messages are sent via the app, not email. Bonus tip: turn on push notifications so you don’t miss a chance to join a conversation as it happens.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two speech bubbles in the bottom bar. You’ll see a row for the “Kevan Lee chat” inside.
That’s it! Jump into a thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
Misc.
Product-Zeitgeist fit. I may need to write a newsletter soon about marketing-zeitgeist fit, which is a concept we’re exploring.
Podcast recommendation 💯 … Marketing Against the Grain is a must-listen for startup marketers. The full library is stocked with awesome stories about growth strategy, channel tactics, leadership, trends, and more. Check out this episode on: How do you grow a podcast from 0-70k monthly downloads in 6 months? HubSpot’s CMO and SVP of Marketing share what they learned about growing a podcast:
How they found an unfair advantage to grow
What you need to do to launch your own podcast
How they’re improving their next strategy
(And no, this is not my way of saying that I’ll be starting a podcast in 2023 … unless you want me to!)
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster. I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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