Rochester's Low/No Meeting Wednesdays

Rochester’s No/Low Meeting Wednesdays

It’s easy to get stuck in a rut when we continue to stick with a work routine that may be common practice but not always an efficient use of time.

That’s the situation the City of Rochester team found themselves in before launching their “Low/No Meeting Wednesdays” initiative through the city’s High Performance Organization (HPO) Academy. The initiative’s goal is to eliminate meetings where possible while making all remaining meetings more efficient and productive by having “low” or “no” meetings on Wednesdays.

The plan was developed by a cohort of roughly 15 teammates in the HPO Academy who referred to themselves as “The Silo Busters.” Administration quickly gave its stamp of approval before “Low/No Meeting Wednesdays” was launched in January 2023.

“I’ve been reading all this stuff about time richness,” Rochester City Administrator Alison Zelms said. “It’s great to be hybrid, but it’s also hard to be hybrid because some folks are in back-to-back-to-back-to-back meetings because there’s no flow. And we’re already sort of meeting intense here and email intense.”

Zelms said the initiative was designed to address staff feeling overwhelmed and burnt out with little time to focus on their work outside of meetings.

“The way I look at it, this is less about the ‘low’ and ‘no’ meeting and more about the productivity,” Zelms said. “Figure out systems and processes that will help you to be as productive as possible and fulfilled and not feel like, ‘OK, I got half the stuff done I wanted to do this week.’”

Wednesdays weren’t an ideal day to eliminate as many meetings as possible for all city departments, and the Silo Busters cohort knew it would be impossible to expect city teammates to never schedule a meeting on a Wednesday again. Instead of setting their team up for failure, they provided the tools necessary to conduct productive meetings.

The “Low/No Meeting Wednesdays” toolkit includes a meeting agenda template, meeting minutes template, a flowchart that indicates whether its even necessary to have a meeting, and a description of the initiative’s 5 Ps: Purpose, Prepare, People, Participate, and Produce. The cohort also produced a fun and creative video to introduce “Low/No Meeting Wednesdays.”

Zelms realizes that rolling out a new initiative requires more work in the beginning in order for there to be more productive work in the future, but she recognizes the process is all about “adapting.”

“We’re at work a lot,” Zelms said. “We should feel fulfilled at the end of the day — even if it was just one thing that you got to do that inspired you to want to go back tomorrow.”