How to use this template
Copy the policy below into your wiki or handbook, change the parts in square brackets, and delete any rule your team will not actually keep. A short policy people follow beats a long one they ignore.
Then do two things the policy cannot do on its own:
- Agree it as a team. A rule announced from above becomes a rule people work around. Share a draft, take objections for a week, and adopt what survives.
- Put a date on the first review. Policies drift. Check in [three months] whether each rule is being followed and whether it helped.
The policy
[Company name] meeting policy
Adopted [date]. Next review [date]. Owner: [name or role].
1. Meetings are for decisions and discussion, not for status. Updates that only need reading go in writing: [Slack channel / weekly doc / project tool]. If a meeting exists only to share status, replace it with a written update.
2. Every meeting has an agenda in the invite. The agenda says what the meeting is for and what it should end with: a decision, a plan, or a list of open questions. No agenda by [24 hours] before the start means attendees may decline.
3. Default lengths are 25 and 50 minutes. Calendars default to 25- and 50-minute meetings so people have time to move between them. Book longer only when the agenda needs it.
4. Invite the people who are needed, not the people who might be interested. Every invitee should have a reason to be there that the organizer could say out loud. Everyone else gets the notes. As a guide, decision meetings stay at [7] people or fewer.
5. Anyone may decline a meeting without an agenda or without a clear role for them. Declining is not rude. Reply with a short reason, and ask for the notes if you need them.
6. Protect focus time. [Tuesday and Thursday mornings / Wednesdays] are kept free of internal meetings. Customer, candidate and incident meetings are the exceptions.
7. Every meeting ends with written outcomes. Within [24 hours] the organizer posts what was decided, who owns each next step, and by when. If nothing was decided, the notes say so.
8. Recurring meetings expire. Every recurring meeting is reviewed [every quarter] by its organizer: is it still needed, at this length, with these people, this often? A recurring meeting nobody defends is canceled.
9. Start on time and end early. Meetings start at the booked time without recapping for late arrivals. Ending early when the agenda is done is always fine.
10. Cameras, recordings and notes. [State your norms: cameras optional; recording only with everyone's agreement; notes stored in a shared place.]
Why each rule is there
Status in writing (rule 1). Status updates are the easiest meetings to remove, because a written update carries the same information, can be read in a couple of minutes, and can be read at a time that suits the reader.
Agendas (rule 2). An agenda is not paperwork. It is the organizer deciding, before taking an hour from other people, what that hour is for. If that cannot be written down, the meeting is not ready.
25 and 50 minutes (rule 3). Back-to-back hour-long meetings leave no time to move, take a break or write notes. Google Calendar's speedy meetings setting and Outlook's end appointments and meetings early setting both do this automatically.
Fewer invitees (rule 4). Cost scales with headcount. A one-hour meeting of 12 people on a $100,000 average salary costs about $577 in salary alone; the same meeting with 6 costs half that. How much does a meeting cost? explains the arithmetic, and the meeting cost calculator checks your own numbers.
The right to decline (rule 5). Without this rule, rules 2 and 4 cannot be enforced. People accept invites they should decline because declining feels like a statement. Writing it down removes the statement.
Focus time (rule 6). Deep work needs unbroken blocks, and an unprotected calendar gets cut into 30-minute gaps that are too short to start anything. The no-meeting day calculator estimates what a protected day is worth to your team.
Written outcomes (rule 7). A meeting that ends without written outcomes tends to be held again. The notes are also how people who were not invited stay informed, which is what makes rule 4 possible.
Recurring meetings expire (rule 8). One-off meetings are easy to question, because each one has to be booked. Recurring meetings are booked once and then run for years. They are usually the largest share of meeting time, and the least examined.
Making it stick
A policy only changes behavior when people can see whether it is being followed. Three things help:
- Review the most expensive recurring meetings first. Rule 8 is the one with the biggest payoff, and the hardest to do from memory. Start with the meetings that cost the most each year.
- Make cost visible to organizers. People book differently when they can see that a weekly meeting costs $20,000 a year.
- Check back at the review date. Has the share of the week in meetings gone down? Which rules are being ignored, and why?
Hourari does the first two automatically: it connects to your calendars, prices every meeting, and ranks your recurring meetings by cost with what each one costs a year, so the quarterly review in rule 8 starts with numbers instead of guesses.