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🎒 Microlesson

🪞 Reflect

Think about all the meetings you’ve had in the past week—were there any verbal decisions made or action items assigned?

How would any team members who were not present know about those decisions and assignments?

💡 Concept

In work environments that default to synchronous communication, decisions are usually made in planned meetings and impromptu conversations.

That’s all well and good—as long as those decisions are clearly, accurately, and thoroughly documented in a place that employees can easily access, regardless of where they are located.

Unless decisions are intentionally shared with anyone outside the room or Zoom, you create information silos among the people who 1) were present at the meetings and 2) remember the decisions. Especially in hybrid environments, the risk for proximity bias is high.

By documenting each decision that is made verbally, you make that information accessible to everyone who needs it, whether they were present at the meeting or not.

🎬 Take Action

Here are some things you can do to document decisions at meetings:

• If you are facilitating:

  • State where any decisions will be documented before you get started.

  • During the meeting, write down the decisions that are made or assign this task to someone else.

  • At the end, review all the decisions and action items and verify that they have been documented.

• If you are attending:

  • At the start of any meeting where decisions will be made, ask where those decisions will be documented and by whom.

  • If a decision is made and is not documented, remind the facilitator to do so.

📄 Additional Resources

Anatomy of a Perfect Blended Meeting

✅ Check In

🧠 Keep Learning

Leaders can learn more about using a blend of asynchronous and synchronous communication in decision-making in our Leadplaceless eCourse.

📰 News

Workplaceless CEO Tammy Bjelland will be delivering a webinar for Product League on Wednesday, May 24 on remote product management: Is it right for you? Is it relevant to your organization? What are the steps to making it work?

🎁 Learn with your team!

Refer our weekly microlessons to your team members to learn as a group! Just follow the instructions in the section below to get started.