This Is How Managers Can Avoid Conflict In The Workplace

No one enjoys conflict in the workplace, least of all the managers who have to deal with it. Naturally, the best way to clean up the mess is through conflict prevention. As the saying goes “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” and prevention is the solution to workplace conflict. It’s a […]

The Biggest Time Wasters in Standup Meetings

I’ve been in some pretty lame standup meetings in my day. When I think back to what made them so ineffective, I can see one common denominator—wasting time. That’s really what most things come down to, isn’t it? “Am I gaining any value by being here?” If the answer is yes, we stay. If the […]

The 3 Pillars You Need for Mastering the Rockefeller Habits

If your company’s still scaling, there’s a good chance you’ve read Scaling Up, by Verne Harnish, and you are interested in mastering the Rockefeller habits. More than 40,000 business leaders have reportedly relied on it to grow their businesses, and with good reason. This book is one of this century’s most important for startups, CEOs and […]

How to Hold Better One-on-One Meetings: Tips from Respected Managers

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about managing teams, it’s this: For an entire team to succeed, the productivity and happiness of every individual matters. A lot. In fact, when it comes to reaching goals, many managers will tell you that an effective one-on-one meeting is far more important than daily status updates and water cooler conversations. […]

28 One-on-One Meeting Questions to Improve Communication in the Workplace

When successful, one-on-one meetings contribute to development opportunities for employees, building trust, and fostering important communication. So, we came up with “The List” of great one-on-one meeting questions. We have something for every situation. Some are best for pre-meeting questionnaires and others for the actual meeting. All of them are best kept in your back […]

The One-on-One Meeting: What Every Manager Should Know

Did you know that the top tech teams utilize one-on-one meetings? The senior manager of software development at Rackspace regularly blocks off time to sit down with each member of his team and see how things are going. So do managers at Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Atlassian. So does Ben Horowitz. Do you know which companies […]

Free Meeting Calculator: How Much Time Do You Waste? Find Out…

At Jell, we’re focused on reducing the need for unnecessary meetings while making fewer meetings more successful. We have regular one-on-ones and daily standups, but we don’t waste more time in meetings than needed. We talked about the science of productive meetings and the psychology of routine meetings but has your team calculated just how […]

The Science of Productive Meetings: Quality Over Quantity

The saying “quality over quantity” holds in many facets of life—so why not use this mindset to plan productive meetings? If you read our post on the psychology of routine meetings, you know the difference between meetings that make teams more efficient and ones that aren’t truly essential. In this post, we’ll look at three […]

Psychology of Routine Meetings: Understanding the Cause and Cure

If you view weekly status updates or daily check-ins as a necessary cost of managing a team, this is the post for you. If you regularly multitask or tune out during meetings, this post is for you, too. And if you attend or schedule routine meetings because you’re afraid of missing out on important details, […]

Slack’s Killing Email Excess. Are Mindless Meetings Next?

For generations, employees have endured a peculiar workplace tradition. They spend hours a day deleting, filing, forwarding and searching a form of communication called email. Endless chains are created as people seek to solve problems, get answers, showcase accomplishments, demonstrate progress and keep everyone in the loop. Now Slack is poised to kill these age-old […]

An Abridged History of Scrum Standups and Agile Project Management

Have you ever wondered where daily scrum standups started? Or why yours are starting to feel more like mindless meetings than productivity-boosters? In this post you’ll get a short history of the daily standup trend—and how to make standups more effective for your team. Today’s standups can be traced back to World War I. Military […]

Meeting Cost: The Financial Value of Productive Meetings

Do you want to make your team more efficient and run productive meetings? Are you looking for easy ways to generate more revenue for your business? Have you evaluated your team meeting cost yet? Making the best of the time people spend in meetings is one of the most important things you can do to […]

The Secret to Running Successful Meetings

Are you worried that your meetings suck? Are you trying to cut back on the amount of time your team spends conversing when they could be producing? Do you want to do better at running successful meetings? Meetings have their place and can be a cornerstone of collaboration. So why do we spend so much time […]

You Know Your Meetings Suck If…

Not a fan of meetings? We know how you feel. Frustrated. Unproductive. Bored. We’ve all been there. Since introducing Jell, things have gotten better around here. Online standups now help get everyone in sync on day-to-day activities. So when we do schedule meetings, it’s to discuss the important issues that will help grow the business […]

How to Work Effectively with Daily Standups

Do you ever feel like everyone’s flying solo? One team member announces she’s launching into Project C while everyone else is still fine-tuning Project A. No one really knows what John is up to and Pete is still finalizing the reports you were anticipating three weeks ago. Make Daily Standups Effective If you spend more […]

How to Use Slack Integrations to Replace Mindless Meetings

Businesses everywhere are working toward eliminating “unproductivity tools” and outdated methods of communication. Endless email chains and mindless meetings are out. All-in-one apps are in. For many growing companies and remote teams, that means two-year-old Slack is playing a major role in day-to-day communications and collaborations. This group chat app has become essential to many […]