Harvard Business Review offers a blueprint for better virtual meetings

Why this still matters in a hybrid company

Harvard Business Review’s case for better virtual meetings is useful because it treats meetings as operational infrastructure, not calendar filler. The core point is blunt: productive meetings do not happen by accident, and virtual settings raise the bar on preparation, clarity, and participation. That matters inside monday.com, where cross-functional decisions often move through meetings before they ever show up in a workflow board.

For engineers, product managers, and sales teams, the cost of a sloppy meeting does not stay in the room. It turns into duplicate work, unclear ownership, rework, and missed handoffs later in the week. In a company that says it is all about transparency and communication, the meeting itself becomes a test of whether those values are real or just branding.

The timing is not abstract either. monday.com says it has more than 250,000 customers worldwide, and its 2025 annual report shows 51,160,822 ordinary shares outstanding as of December 31, 2025. A company operating at that scale cannot afford a culture where recurring staff meetings blur into status theater. The stakes are not just time lost. They are coordination quality, execution speed, and how quickly teams can turn agreement into action.

What HBR gets right about virtual meetings

HBR’s guidance is practical rather than mystical. Use video. Prepare a detailed agenda. Make participation expectations explicit. In later guidance on big virtual meetings, the advice gets even more concrete: highlight the goals in the invite and share a working document at the start. That is not ceremonial process. It is how you reduce confusion before it spreads.

The reason this works is simple. Virtual meetings strip away a lot of the informal cues people rely on in person. Without a clear agenda and a shared way to speak up, the loudest voice can dominate, quieter participants can disappear, and the meeting can end with vague agreement instead of real commitment. HBR’s framework pushes managers to replace those missing cues with structure.

That is especially relevant for distributed teams working across time zones. If the meeting begins with everyone guessing what success looks like, half the room is already behind. If the invite spells out the goal, the meeting starts with a shared target. If the group sees a working document at the top of the call, discussion turns into live coordination rather than passive listening.

A meeting reset for team leads

The easiest way to apply this is to reset one recurring staff meeting before touching the rest of the calendar. Start with the invite. Spell out the purpose, the expected outcome, and the one decision or update the meeting is meant to produce. If the meeting has no decision, no owner, and no next step, it probably needs to be shorter or removed.

Then tighten the opening. HBR’s advice to use the first few minutes to align on expectations is the right move for managers who want better participation. Say who is leading, who is taking notes, and how people should jump in. That one minute of framing can prevent 30 minutes of people talking past each other.

A practical reset looks like this:

• Put the goal in the invite, not buried in a vague title.
• Open with the outcome you need by the end of the call.
• Use video when the meeting depends on discussion, trust, or feedback.
• Share a working document at the start so comments turn into edits, not side conversations.
• End with clear owners, deadlines, and the place where follow-up will live.

The point is not to make meetings more formal for its own sake. It is to make them easier to execute against. Teams often assume that a good conversation is the same thing as a useful meeting. It is not. A useful meeting leaves behind a decision, an owner, and a next action that can survive the day.

Why this is a monday.com story, not just an HBR story

monday.com has spent years positioning itself around transparency, communication, and coordination. Its support materials describe the company as “all about transparency and communication,” and its mission is to help teams build a culture of transparency. That makes the company’s own internal meeting discipline part of the product story, not separate from it.

The company’s physical footprint tells the same story. monday.com opened a new North American headquarters in New York City at 225 Park Avenue South, spanning 110,000 square feet across four floors. It also expanded in Denver, with that office launch saying the space was meant to empower teams in hybrid work and balance in-person work with a remote setting. The message is consistent: even in a remote-first or hybrid environment, the company still expects people to coordinate well across place and time.

That is why hybrid meetings sit at the center of modern work at monday.com, both inside and outside the company. monday.com published a 2026 article saying uneven hybrid experiences can slow collaboration and cause ideas to be missed. That warning lines up neatly with HBR’s guidance. The medium changes, but the management problem stays the same: if you do not design the meeting, the meeting designs the outcome for you.

For teams building and selling work management software, that is a particularly sharp lesson. Product teams need clean decision logs. Sales teams need crisp discovery calls and executive updates. Engineering teams need meetings that end with concrete ownership, not a vague promise to “circle back.” The better the meeting mechanics, the less energy gets burned cleaning up avoidable ambiguity afterward.

The operating rule for managers

The real value of HBR’s advice is that it turns virtual meetings into a management skill. Not everyone needs a different personality. Every team does need the same discipline: agenda upfront, goals explicit, participation rules clear, and follow-up captured where the work already lives.

That is the standard monday.com should hold internally if it wants to match its external message. In a company that sells transparency and workflow control, meetings are part of the workflow. When managers treat them that way, they stop being a drain on hybrid work and start becoming the mechanism that keeps it coherent.