Re-arrange schedule to improve performance

A retrospective analysis showed numerous complaints from the team regarding meetings.

To better understand the situation, I asked my teammates to provide their calendars from the past month so I could analyze the frequency of developer meetings. So, I notice, that:

• As is often the case in large corporations, there are a lot of meetings that are not mandatory, and developers express little interest in attending them.
• Colleagues from other teams frequently scheduled instant meetings to discuss topics that did not appear urgent.
• The schedule on certain days resembled a zebra - one hour meeting, one hour of free time, one hour meeting again. This practice impedes productivity by causing frequent context switching.

To resolve the complain, we decided to implement the “No Meetings Afternoon“ rule. This required some adjustments:

• If a developer receives an invitation for a “boring corporate meeting” and wishes to skip it, they can ask me, their manager, for approval. In most cases, it is granted immediately.
• We informed all teams and stakeholders about this rule. If anyone insists on scheduling a meeting in the afternoon, they should discuss it with me first to prioritize the meeting’s importance and determine if it truly requires scheduling at the proposed time box.

The first weeks of enforcing this rule were challenging. We worked to teach teammates to adhere to it and negotiated with external teams to reschedule meetings.

However, over time, our developers haven’t complained about their meeting schedule, and their performance has improved according to their feedback.