Ah, the dreaded status meeting. It inspires brief bursts of productivity immediately before the meeting, but often results in a dozen of highly paid individuals sitting in a room, recounting what they accomplished last week. If every project requires a weekly status meeting, this can become costly. These six simple tips will help team leaders and project managers ease the pain of status meetings and reap the rewards of increased productivity.

1. 6 Tips for More Effective Status Meetings
Keeping stakeholders informed without
spending 6 hours a week in meetings

2. Introduction
Ah, the dreaded status meeting.
It inspires brief bursts of productivity immediately before the meeting, but often results in
a dozen of highly paid individuals sitting in a room, recounting what they accomplished
last week. If every project requires a weekly status meeting, this can become costly.
These six simple tips will help team leaders and project managers ease the pain of status
meetings and reap the rewards of increased productivity.

3. 1. Choose the right frequency
If you get too routine and predictable with your status meetings,
team members often adjust their momentum to the pace of the
meeting schedule—only accomplishing what is necessary to have
something to report on, and then forgetting about the project
until the next meeting.

4. Rick A. Morris and Brette Sember
Amanet.org
“There is a myth that because a project exists, a
status meeting must exist. The problem with this
thinking is that it conditions people to not be
productive during the week.”

5. Patrice Embry
Senior Project Manager,
Pharmaceutical and Healthcare
Industries
“For me, it comes down to how
often we need to meet in order
to make sure we’re aligned—
both sides feel like they have a
good handle on what’s going on.
Most likely, that will change as
the project moves through its
cycles. We may start at bi-
weekly, but toward the end, we
may be touching on hot items
daily.”

6. 1. Choose the right frequency
Note: “Touching on hot items daily” does not require all hands on deck, and it doesn’t
have to be in person.

7. 2. Communicate between meetings
On teams that don’t have a dedicated project manager, today’s software solutions can be a
feline. If every member of the team is regularly logging in to the same online environment to
rack time, collaborate, post updates, review deliverables, and assign and accept tasks—
project status will rarely be in question. And if stakeholders are given the proper access, they
an pop in to see how things are going any time they want.

8. 3. Be prepared
If a work management software solution is in place, everyone on the team will have
a fairly good grasp on status before a meeting. But this doesn’t make project
managers or status meetings irrelevant.
On the contrary, meeting time can be used for more than a simple round-robin of
“here’s what I did this week!” declarations. Instead, team members can get aligned
around vision and goals, identify and remove bottlenecks, and make course
corrections as needed.

9. Patrice Embry
Senior Project Manager, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industries
“A clear time duration, an agenda that has more than sparse bullet points, and a statement
about what should be decided or settled by the end of the meeting (clear next steps, a
decision on design A or B, etc.) sent out before the meeting can be super helpful. Starting off
the discussion by saying, ‘Okay, we have until 3:00 p.m., and we have five things to work on
today, so let’s get right into it’ helps, too.”

10. 4. Stick to an agenda
Just having an agenda will make your status meeting stand out from most other status
meetings. But that’s not enough.
You also need to manage participants to the agenda. Don’t allow team members to
hijack the time for off-topic brainstorming, reviewing or revising deliverables, or solving
conflicts that only involve one or two of the people in the room. Those topics should be
handled offline or in a different meeting.

11. Patrice Embry
Senior Project Manager, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare Industries
“When someone starts getting off topic or we start running out of time, I put on my self-
deprecating project manager hat and say, ‘As PM, it’s my legal obligation to let you know
that we only have 5 minutes left.’ This usually gets both a chuckle and renewed sense of
urgency.”

12. 5. Take notes

13. Patrice Embry
Senior Project Manager, Pharmaceutical and Healthcare
Industries
“Status should never happen without some sort of means
of recording information, whether that’s in a
spreadsheet, a document, a list in your project
management system—whatever gets the job done. Being
able to reference previous decisions is super helpful, and
it keeps everyone on task.”

14. 5. Take notes
Of course, there are limitations to spreadsheets and documents, especially if they are
only accessible to the person who created them. Shared online documents like Google
Docs go one step further, allowing the entire team to view, contribute to, print, and
share the information easily.

15. 5. Take notes
Even better is a work management system that can not only store information, but also:
- Send automatic reminders
- Calculate by percentage how much work is left to be done
- Generate reports
- Make it easy to assign follow-up tasks to different individuals
- Integrate seamlessly with other systems, like email and Google Docs

16. 5. Take notes
A running status sheet is also a must.
This kind of list can be especially useful when you have stakeholders whose engagement with
you fluctuates widely, and yet they have the power to bring everything to a screeching halt
seemingly at will. This is usually a C-level manager.
For stakeholders like this, regularly delivering the “running status sheet” in his or her
preferred communication method can keep the interruptions at bay.

17. 6. Stop calling them status meetings
Unless your goal for the meeting really is about achieving a common
understanding of where the project currently stands—instead of making
strategic decisions and using the time to collaborate and refine—it makes
more sense to call it something other than a “status meeting.” Even to slight
shift to “sync-up meeting” can create a different expectation in your
participants’ minds.

18. Patrick Theam
Rhythmsystems.com
“There is so much power in what you choose to call this meeting. What you call it sets the
tone and expectations of everyone that’s coming. If you don’t do anything else, at least
change the name of your meeting to a Weekly Adjustment Meeting. We don’t need
‘death by status’ anymore. We need to discuss solutions, and make the necessary and
often critical adjustments in our execution so that we can achieve the objectives for the
quarter. So let’s call it that!”

19. The End of Status Meetings?
Of course, we would like to see status meetings occupy a more elevated, respected, and
yes, rare, place in corporate life. Times have changed. There are so many more convenient
ways to update each other on project status—email, work management software, shared
Google docs and spreadsheets, instant messaging, even texts. And these methods are also
archivable and searchable, which is something you can’t say about updates that are
verbally volleyed around a conference room table.

20. The End of Status Meetings?
By refocusing the purpose of status meetings and reducing their number, you can use
your precious face-to-face time to collaborate about where you want to go—instead of
merely explaining where you are right now (yawn) or describing where you’ve already
been.

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