How to make virtual meetings count with Asana’s Meeting Manifesto

Whether we’d like to admit it or not, meetings are a fact of work life. When conducted consciously, they can be a highly effective tool for sharing ideas or making decisions. Unfortunately too many of us have experienced “bad” meetings, the kind that turn into a laundry list of status updates rather than a productive meeting of the minds. So what’s a team to do when the best way for them to align is to meet in real time?

Here at Asana, we believe every meeting should serve two purposes: Move work forward and convert ideas to actions. If these bars aren’t met, then it’s likely the meeting could have been a task (we don’t use email here!). To ensure our teams are running effective meetings that help us deliver on our mission, we developed our very own Meeting Manifesto.

What is Asana’s Meeting Manifesto?

Asana’s meeting manifesto is a set of guidelines and strategies that help us structure and run more effective meetings. We developed it to help our internal teams meet more thoughtfully and embody our core values no matter where in the world they were working. But after hearing that so many of our customers and partners were also struggling to run effective meetings while remote we decided, why not share it with the world?

Below is a copy of the same Manifesto we use internally. It’s how we do great things fast so we can achieve our mission—and we’re pretty proud of it. We hope it provides helpful guidance for running more worthwhile meetings with your own team, or inspires your business to write a meeting manifesto of its own.

How does your team meet effectively?

It’s no surprise that Asana plays a big part in how our teams run effective meetings here at Asana. What are some other tools and tips you use to make the most out of your team’s virtual time together? Share them in the comments below. Who knows, you might just be inspiring the next great meeting manifesto!