What Your Agile Team Wished You Knew About Your Meetings

There are countless stats out there that prove that most people don’t love meetings. However, it’s hard to quantify exactly how many people hate meetings, but don’t want to rock the boat or jeopardize their position in their workplace by saying something about it.

The scrum environment can often be meeting-heavy. An estimate from VitalityChicago.com broke down the average 2-week span for a scrum team as follows:

1.5 hours in Sprint Retrospectives
2 hours in Sprint Reviews
6 hours in Backlog Refinement
2.5 hours in Daily Scrums
And 4 hours in Sprint Planning

That only leaves 64 hours of theoretical working hours — meaning the average agile team is only spending 80% of their time doing what they do best and doing the work that creates revenue.

What’s the solution? Hold fewer meetings? Most scrum masters will tell you that these meetings are integral to success, particularly when working with remote teams. You need adequate Sprint Planning to map things out. You need Daily Scrums to ensure progress and identify barriers. And you need Retrospectives to ensure your team can look back and identify any problems with this project so they’re not a recurring problem on the next project, and the one after that.

If these meetings are a necessary evil, how can we make them less evil? The first step could be to identify the most common problems and complaints among scrum team members, then try to hold better meetings.

If you can address these complaints and change how you run your agile meetings, your team members will start to see these meetings as something that helps productivity, instead of something that takes them away from productivity.

1. “This Takes Me Away from Valuable Focus Time and Actual Work.”

This problem is not unique to the agile sector. Most people who hate meetings will list this as the top reason.

Consider that:

65% of surveyed people believe that meetings keep them from completing their own work
64% believe that meetings sacrifice deep thinking (which is crucial in agile problem solving)
73% admit they use meeting time to do other work

This problem comes with its own built-in vicious cycle. Some people may show up to meetings expecting "Just another meeting,” so they’re disengaged and don’t offer much to the conversation.

Now, other people are picking up on the fact that others are disengaged. They ‘read the room’ and feel like most people in the room just want this to end as quickly as possible, so they may hesitate to offer something (even if it’s something meaningful) that could drag the meeting on longer. As a result, that meeting is unproductive and sours everyone’s mentality going into the next meeting.

Wince and repeat.

2. “I’m an Introvert and Don’t Come Up with Ideas in a Group Setting.”

Expectation: The team has a lively discussion where each team member builds on the previous idea on how to solve a problem.

Reality: Dead air and awkward pauses as nobody can come up with something. Where’s the synergy you were promised?

Part of the problem may be that your more introverted team members are not contributing because:

They’re too focused on the social dynamics of the group to make a meaningful contribution
They have ideas, but are worried about contributing them
They’re worn out from being “on” in a group setting for this long
Any combination of the above

There’s an idea that all coders and developers are introverted. That’s simply not true and an unfair characterization. However, when you consider that anywhere from 25-40% of the entire population is classified as introverted, you can assume that at least one of every four of your team members is not comfortable in a meeting. They are also more likely to get tired of constant meetings, with an estimated 58% of surveyed introverts admitting to experiencing Zoom fatigue, compared to only 40% of surveyed extroverts.

They may feel especially hesitant to ask for help in a daily scrum, and even more hesitant to point out problems with the last sprint in a retrospective.

Want to learn how AI can help unlock your agile team’s brainstorming? Click here to read more about StormAI!

3. “It Takes Time to Get Back into a Productive Headspace After a Meeting”

Once again, this problem is rampant across all sectors, not just the agile world. We probably don’t have to tell you that it’s hard to go from a meeting (passive) state of mind to a productive work-focused (active) state of mind. It can feel like trying to start a car when it’s very cold. It may take a minute and there may be some false starts.

Psychologists have acknowledged that this is very real. It’s called Meeting Recovery Syndrome (MRS). It describes the sense of exhaustion you may feel after a stressful or boring meeting. They estimate that it can take you 10-15 minutes to refresh and recalibrate after a meeting — maybe a fresh coffee and a quick scroll on your phone. However, when you’re dealing in an MRS-like state, that time stretches to closer to 45 minutes.

How can that hurt an agile team? Let's take those five types of meetings listed above. Take the five 15-minute morning scrums and roll them into one 75-minute meeting per week. Now add 45 minutes to each of the meeting types in a 2-week span:

Daily Scrums (converted to two 75-minute meetings): 90 minutes
Sprint planning (assume two 1-hour meetings): 90 minutes
Retrospective (assume one 90-minute meeting): 45 minutes
Backlog refinement (assume three 2-hour meetings) 90 minutes
Two-week total: 315 minutes or 5.25 hours of recovery time

That means your team could be spending 5.25 hours every two weeks recovering from the meetings that are already taking up 20% of your time.

You’re down to 59.5 theoretical working hours.

4. “These Meetings are Just for Managers.”

This is another common frustration across all sectors. However, it’s particularly prevalent in the scrum world where agile team members sometimes don’t feel like managers truly understand how agile works.

In fact, The 17th State of Agile Report surveyed over 700 top agile coaches, scrum masters, and project managers. Respondents were asked to list the biggest blockers that their team struggles with, and leadership problems accounted for 3 of the top 5 most cited barriers:

General organization resistance to change/culture clash (47%)
Not enough leadership participation (41%)
Inadequate management, support, and/or sponsorship (38%)
Business team, not understanding what agile does and/or can do (37%)
Insufficient training, and/or education (27%)

The irony is that managers can feel equally frustrated by these meetings. They often simply want a high-level view of how the project is going. However, that’s not really possible when the goalposts are constantly being moved back during a sprint.

They don’t live in this world every day the way the dev team does. They may not even fully understand the tools. A screenshare of your Jira backlog in list-view may simply look like meaningless lines of text to the company’s higher-ups

However, using Stormboard can give your managers a better visual representation of your current sprint. They don’t need to be Jira experts to understand your board, or even need a Jira login for that matter.