Formal Research Proposal

To: Dr. Erika Paterson, ENGL 301 Instructor

From: Corbyn Kwan, ENGL 301 Student <corbynkwan@gmail.com>

Date: February 26, 2023

Subject: Strategies to make meetings in a tech company I worked at more effective

 

Introduction

In a tech company I worked at, these are the types of meetings that frequently occur:

1. 1-on-1s – A meeting between a manager and software engineer to reflect on their performance and how to improve.
2. Standup – A daily meeting where each person in the team says what they did yesterday.
3. Design meetings – A meeting to design from a high-level technical view to solve a problem.

These meetings typically have a lot of inefficiencies that cause meetings to run overtime and thus waste all the time of the meeting attendees.

The purpose of this research proposal is to explore the inefficiencies of these 3 common meeting types that occur in a tech company and to identify potential solutions that can improve the overall effectiveness of these meetings. This research will be valuable to both employers and managers, as it will provide insights into how to better structure and conduct these meetings to maximize their value and minimize time wastage which can be allocated to solve the team’s problems.

Audience Description

My manager at a tech company I worked at.

Statement of Problem

1-on-1 meetings are typically unorganized. Employees will blank out and not know what to say, and not knowing what to say ends up being a talk about personal related topics.

Standup meetings involve everyone saying what they did the day before. If someone says a problem during the meeting, a long discussion would be between 2 members of the team that everyone else in the standup didn’t have to listen to which wastes a lot of time.

Design meetings – These meetings are very disorganized, and everyone just says what’s on their mind with no distinct goals in mind. This disorganization typically ends up with meetings taking up to 5 hours which could be cut much shorter.

Proposed Solution

1-on-1 meetings could have a pre-defined set of topics such as:

1. Whether or not you are in line with your career goals (i.e. promotion)
2. Reflections of the week
3. Problems you ran into that week and how you can improve next time
4. Positives during the week

This organized structure would allow the employee to learn more effectively as well as save time.

Standup meetings should have the manager set a time limit for how long a team member can talk so that other people in the team don’t have their time wasted.

Design meetings should have a meeting agenda so a set of topics can be discussed 1 by 1 instead of all over the place. The manager should have the authority to ask attendees to speak down if they dominate the meeting conversation.

Scope

To explore strategies to make meetings more efficient, I plan to pursue these areas of inquiry:

• What makes 1-on-1s, standups, and design meetings so inefficient?
• What are the strategies to make these meetings efficient?
• Why do these strategies make these meetings efficient?
• How much time do these strategies save?

Methods

My primary data source will come from a survey of employees of the company to collect their opinions on what makes these meetings inefficient.

Secondary sources will be publications that discuss strategies to make these types of meetings more effective and why they make them more effective.

My Qualifications

I used to work for the manager this report is addressed. I have been in these meetings, and have first-hand experience with how ineffective they were.

Conclusion

Inefficient meetings are rampant in the tech company I used to work for. By having strategies in place for these meetings to be more efficient, participants in these meetings would save time and resources that could be allocated elsewhere.