This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here.
Recognising that your meetings aren’t working is one thing. Fixing that is another. At Taxi Studio, they decided this was an area they wanted to focus on – and they are already reaping the benefits.
We spoke with creative director Stu Tallis and in-house coach Katie Scotland about what’s changed in the way they run meetings at the Bristol-based studio.
As leaders, why was this an issue you as wanted to focus on?
Stu Tallis (ST): I think pre-Covid, meetings – or gatherings as I like to call them because meetings sounds a bit corporate – had their challenges. But post-Covid, they got more complicated because we’re all working in a hybrid way.
It’s very rare I go to any gathering where everybody’s either all remote, or all in the same room. There’s always a bit of both, so there are new dynamics to manage.
People on screen can feel a bit superfluous, because they can’t quite hear what’s happening in the room and they don’t get a chance to put their opinions across. They can leave feeling a bit deflated.
Katie, myself and a broader team have been working on thinking about psychological safety, and what that means for us as a studio. And we felt that meetings can be a really good, tangible metaphor for how that can be deployed.
Katie, can you talk a bit about your role at Taxi?
Katie Scotland (KS): I’m available to everyone in the business for them to book in a coaching session for whatever they need.
Sometimes it might be people working on longer-term career growth, sometimes it’s working through an in-the-moment challenge, or some feedback.
Alongside that one-to-one coaching, I also support the team with broader behaviours and development and learning. So I get to see the themes that connect all those different moments together, and the theme of psychological safety runs through it.
Psychological safety is talked about quite a lot, but how well understood is it?
KS: It’s quite an abstract term, and people have different levels of awareness, and different preconceptions of it.
Our starting point is to make sure that psychological safety is understood equally by everyone.
So we took some time to do that, to make sure that people understand that it’s different for everybody, that it’s not necessarily something that we can fully control, that it’s not about being really fluffy and nice, it’s actually about being quite challenging but in a non-judgmental way, so that we can achieve the most productive growth.
Taxi Studio’s Meetings Etiquette guide
What we’ve done over the last few months is to work out how we can make psychological safety really tangible for people.
So we aligned it with Taxi’s three values – live fearless, play fair, and form real relationships. And under each of those, we’ve got really practical steps of how we build psychological safety.
So starting with “Setting expectations” – normalising that people will come with different perspectives, different opinions, and that some stages of a project might be quite challenging.
Then we have “Invite participation.” Make sure you’re intentionally bringing people in, inviting people’s contributions, advocating for others if they are less forthcoming.
And then a really important thing to think about is to “Stay objective.” Keep things really fact-based so you can focus on the topic or the problem, rather than the people dynamics within the room.
And so how do these principles shape meetings at Taxi?
ST: We have introduced some meetings etiquette. One of the main things is encouraging people to think about who really needs to be in a meeting. Who will really add value? And who doesn’t need to be there?
Don’t just invite everyone, because time is precious.
Then we encourage people to set a clear agenda. It can be brief, but put it in the invite, so people can think about it beforehand. What do you want to achieve by the end of the meeting?
And for bigger meetings, we’ve started to encourage people to think about who the best facilitator might be. When you’re dealing with lots of different minds – on screen and in the room – it’s beneficial to have someone focused on participation.
They can notice things. We’ve been in this meeting for half an hour, and that person’s not said a word. Are they ok?
A lot of this is about changing habits and for some people, those habits have been ingrained for decades.
What are the specific challenges of creative meetings?
KS: Pace and energy. There are a lot of ideas flying around and people can get very excited.
It’s a fast-paced business, so people want to get to a solution quickly. That’s positive, but there’s a risk there as well, that we miss other ways of thinking if we don’t pause to get all the right input before we rush forward to a solution.
ST: I get FOMO. If we don’t run these sessions in the right way, I worry that we’ve missed something because the brightest minds, the quietest minds, haven’t had an opportunity to say their piece.
And that bit of work that we just launched could have been even better if we had given that one person the platform to say what they were thinking.
KS: There was a meeting recently which was going really well, and we practically had the project plan done in the room.
But just before the end of the meeting, we hit pause and went round to check where everyone’s head was at. What was their main take-away?
It only took two minutes, but you saw what was quite a frantic energy in the room calm down, and everyone found their own place in it. These small changes can make a big difference.
Do these same meeting principles apply to all meetings at Taxi, like all-hands, and one-to-ones?
KS: Absolutely, it’s across the board. Some of the most intense meetings can be one-to-one. They’re quite often the moments where what someone wants to say goes out of their head completely.
So the same principles apply. Setting expectations – “We’re here to talk about some feedback.”
“Here’s my perspective, I’d love to hear what you think” – that’s inviting participation.
What’s your advice to other leaders who might want to change their meetings culture in this way?
ST: First of all, it’s all about finding people within your business that believe in it, so it’s not just driven by one person saying, “This is what we’re doing now.”
There needs to be a shared vision, and a shared passion – we’ve got different people in different teams that champion this.
And you’ve got to understand what psychological safety means to you.
Katie has worked really hard with the team on this – we’re Taxi Studio. These are our values. What does this mean for who we are and what we do?
Until you done that, you can’t create the rules, and the protocols, and the etiquette, because it should all ladder up to your values and your behaviours as a business.
The other thing is that it’s not going to happen overnight.
We like that quote from James Clear in Atomic Habits – “Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.”
You have to invest in it as a business – it’s a long game.