What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

https://abitmighty.com/posts/the-ultimate-meeting-culture

by todsacerdoti • 12 months ago

189 142 12 months ago

ragebol• 12 months ago

Seems like solid advice indeed, I'm going to try and stick to these guidelines, too often meetings could have been an e-mail or bit of text and take too long.

Msurrow• 12 months ago

This seems good from the attendie’s point of view. I would love a similar post on the culture for calling meetings. There are too many “I don’t want to make an effort to understand/solve issue X so I’ll just create a meeting with everyone who might have an interest so we can all spend 1h talking about if the issue is an issue at all, and if it’s an issue what do we do about it”.. makes me so tired.

gonzo41• 12 months ago

Don't knock it. I've worked in places where they just ignore problems and don't have meetings. It's worse. At least in your example people are moving towards the issue

taherchhabra• 12 months ago

At my ex employer, every employee had an hourly rate in the system, I had thought of pulling the rates from the internal system into Microsoft teams, to display the cost of every meeting.

maxclark• 12 months ago

Shopify did this - it’s frightening when you see the numbers across your entire org

0cf8612b2e1e2• 12 months ago

That feels like it might have perverse incentives if it were formally tracked. On the other hand, as a low level grunt, I would enjoy having some quantitative metrics about the topic. Who acts like this is a game trying to get the high score?

Depending on how it was implemented, might also be possible to unblind people’s salary. A big no-no for a big corporation where there might be laughable pay disparity.

vjvjvjvjghv3• 12 months ago

I (unsuccesfully) tried to make that point before: "You just spent $2000 of paid employee time for a meeting that achieved nothing but we don't have the money to spend $1000 on licenses for X". Didn't work

lawlorino• 12 months ago

I like this. To add: It serves as a strict lower bound, since it doesn’t account for the hidden cost of context switching etc.

theshrike796• 12 months ago

We thought about this in 2002 already :)

"Meeting cost calculator" where the cost of the meeting would tick up in real time on the wall.

IIRC the idea was to have everyone tap their keyfob on a reader and it'd get everyone's hourly salary from a database and start counting the price by the minute.

judge123• 12 months ago

this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?

Tempest1981• 12 months ago

I've definitely done that, and afterwards my boss was approving. (I just leave, no need to say why at the time.)

But we've worked together for several years, so he trusts my judgment.

windward• 12 months ago

Like you I couldn't imagine saying this to my boss. On the other hand, I could imagine saying it at some meetings at a previous employer, much larger, with many more inter-departmental box-ticking meetings.

Meeting culture is something that varies hugely between companies and industries and sectors. IMO that means that advice like this has limited utility unless you're aware of the differences. There are a few topics like this.

If the person you'd be telling it to is your boss, you probably don't have much sway to change the culture beyond regular feedback loops.

alex_duf• 12 months ago

I've done that both in France and the UK. Nothing happen and I got some time back

9dev7• 12 months ago

Can't speak for your boss, but I definitely am sometimes a few abstraction layers further up in concepts than the ICs on the team, and it's a lot more frustrating to realise the others don't really know what I'm getting at because I didn't create clear enough goals than getting that feedback right away.

People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency, and if you don't spin that as "your agenda is trash" but "I cannot contribute to this meeting and would like to pursue my other tasks", I doubt they will be mad at you.

It can also be worth it to bring this up with your team and establish a meeting culture, as suggested in TFA. That way, you can discuss this openly and everyone has a shared understanding of what is okay.

watwut2• 12 months ago

People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency

Equally if not way more often they are there, because they like to control things or organize things or like having power or see it as career setup. Or they like working with people.

Time and efficiency is not something you get on these positions.

9rx6• 12 months ago

it's a lot more frustrating to realise the others don't really know what I'm getting at

I understand why it may initially seem frustrating to realize that you are not offering value to the team, but us ICs are used to recognizing that and quickly cutting you out of the picture. It is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Don't worry.

theshrike796• 12 months ago

I had a deal with one engineer on my team, when I used to do that boss crap.

Their body had to be present in the meeting, but they could keep working on their laptop.

This was because WAAAY too much of the silent information about the company products was on their mind and it was by far the fastest way to get it out.

I could just quickly refer to them for 15 seconds to clarify how something actually worked and keep on with the meeting.

...also they once got bored during a sales meeting and coded a full-ass PoC about what the customer was asking during the meeting. That kind of person.

holowoodman4• 12 months ago

Our company "good vibes" team, after some anonymous suggestions, managed to make this a company-wide policy. Every meeting room has a poster with rules to that effect, and managers are supposedly judged by adherence to those rules.

Not 100%, but seems to work.

pjc502• 12 months ago

The polite way to do this is on receiving the invite, ask for clarification of what's expected from you at the meeting. Combine that with pointing the inviter at someone else who is also invited and you can politely express that your presence is not necessary.

Or just counter-schedule a meeting in the same slot.

watwut2• 12 months ago

I do it regularly. But, I am not rude about it, I do not insult the meeting nor its organizer. I used the sentence "Hi, am I necessary for the X meeting?" Followed by quick reason. Quick reason would be:

- "I have many meetings already and worry about not meeting deadline".

- "I do not have strong opinions either way, so am fine getting just outcome".

- "I do not have knowledge to be useful".

- "It seems like I wont be useful".

Basically, you can guess these from the topic alone. Most of the time, the response is something like "of course no problem" sometimes followed by short explanation why I was called in. Occasionally they say they indeed want me there.

ianmcgowan2• 12 months ago

This is where defensively blocking off your calendar comes in!

indoordin0saur2• 12 months ago

Once I have enough political capital within a company I'll just stop showing up to the ones that are a waste of time for me. If someone asks I'll let them know that it's not useful for me.

yencabulator3• 12 months ago

The best thing one can have in a career is lack of fear of being fired.

9rx6• 12 months ago

I'll silently drop off. No need to interrupt the meeting for anyone who is finding value in it.

Etheryte2• 12 months ago

I think this misses the mark for why people join. We're talking about a professional setting here, I'm coming to your meeting because you invited me to join, not because of fear of missing out (on what?). All the points given in the article are good, but it misses the most important one: if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there. If the meeting could still take place and be useful without someone, don't invite them just to listen in. If you want, shoot an email to a mailing list or post in Slack about it, but don't invite people just because.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

suslik• 12 months ago

if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there. If the meeting could still take place and be useful without someone, don't invite them just to listen in.

I don't think this advice is generic - there can be different perspectives here.

In a managerial role in a large corpo, doing what could be crudely characterized as office politics, I often have this sort of FOMO - missing out on new initiatives, budgets and projects which would be good for the team; or being unable to prevent others dumping hot potatoes onto us; or just not knowing what is brewing behind the scenes within the company. To a degree, I have to do this so that the technical guys don't have to.

My job, really, is to be invited to as many meeting as I can. I can then ditch the ones I don't think would be useful. Of course, often I sit on meetings that are a complete waste of time - but that is an occupational risk. I don't find these frustrating - they allow me to relax a bit, do my email, learn more about people in the meeting, or just practice my note taking.

Etheryte2• 12 months ago

This is a good point and you're right. My take was too narrow based on the types of companies I've been lucky enough to work at.

blitzar• 12 months ago

because of fear of missing out (on what?)

Money, exposure, promotion, money.

People who attend more meetings and do less work get higher pay rises and promoted faster. They are also far less likely to be included in rounds of layoffs given their importance to the organisation.

9dev7• 12 months ago

Especially on larger teams, you may not always be aware of who must be there. It's easier to let people join optionally, given the choices outlined in TFA. You also don't trip into political traps that way, by offending someone you implicitly labeled not important enough to be present. Yes, it's dumb; yes, it's reality.

9rx6• 12 months ago

if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there.

No! Do the opposite of this.

I enjoy the meetings where I can listen in and learn something from others. There can be a lot of value in these meetings — and if truly not, it is easy to slink away.

It is the meetings where the organizer thinks I "must" be there that are always a waste of time. Never fails. Keep me off these invite lists. They are useless.

ryanbigg• 12 months ago

Great advice here! I especially like the idea of 50 minute meetings.

I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”

keiferski• 12 months ago

First, a meeting is primarily not a way to spread knowledge. Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories (which are surprisingly untrustworthy over even tiny time scales). For example; written text. The greatest benefit of text is that it can be asynchronously consumed, multiple times. Meetings are primarily for two things:

I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.

And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.

But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.

(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)

I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.

9dev7• 12 months ago

The value of written notes really adds up over time, though. Once a meeting is over, it's over; a Slack conversation is preserved for new hires or absentees or yourself when you return to it after your vacation.

I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.

rightbyte• 12 months ago

I have never searched old chats for anything but passwords, network folder paths and license keys. Going back to some conversation on some topic and give it to the new guy, does it happen?

b112• 12 months ago

One thing. Trusting an external company with your knowledge base is wrought with concern. If you're going to use slack in that regard, export and backup regularly.

If you must hand over key parts of your company's infrastructure to external companies, at least ensure you have control of your data if they go sideways. Don't put backups in someone else's hands.

Keep drives encrypted in a safe deposit box if you have to.

puszczyk• 12 months ago

I agree in principle, although specifically with slack this is problematic. With emails, wikis, repos, it's easy to index them, or share them with a search engine or LLM. Slack is a moving target; they have the Slack AI, but if you don't enable it, it's hard to just grab all messages from a channel or a thread (and god forbid, you have a channel with multiple relevant threads). A lot of clicks required.

baxtr• 12 months ago

Ultimately, in my experience, it often requires both. Written and oral communication.

Some don’t listen, some won’t read. It’s not only a function of the specific person but also depends on the day who reads and who listens.

So, yeah, in theory, in an ideal world with perfect co-workers you wouldn’t need so many meetings.

In the real, messy world we live in, meetings are one tool to make sure important messages come across.

ghaff• 12 months ago

I'd just add that, in my days at larger companies in particular, there were a lot of things that were were probably vaguely useful for me to be aware of, but if someone dropped a document about initiative XYZ in my inbox, I probably wouldn't have read it. But I would have gotten the highlights at a regularly scheduled meeting.

thesuitonym• 12 months ago

I think that says more about Slack than it does about meetings or written communication. Slack is meant for short, almost-but-not-quite ephemeral dialog. It's great for giving a quick blast of information, updating others, and seeing if someone is available for a call (Not by their status, but by asking), but too many people also see it as a repository of information, which is not what it's meant to be.

theshrike796• 12 months ago

Then you can combine it with a meeting.

1) send knowledge to people who need to know it, tell them there's gonna be a Q&A meeting about it in X days.

2) have said meeting.

pyman• 12 months ago

Having an agenda and a moderator is not enough. What meetings also need is:

1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?

2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?

3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?

Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.

Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.

In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.

In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.

shenberg• 12 months ago

The reality of meetings in most places I've seen is that key stakeholders have already formed an opinion beforehand, the meeting is a place to disseminate decisions that have already been made and align the organization.

pjc502• 12 months ago

Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time.

Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.

It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.

Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660

Cthulhu_2• 12 months ago

That's a good analogy / way to think about it, the stand-up should be more of a social call anyway (especially for remote work) to check in with each other and whatever they're working on, but anything in-depth should be done outside of it.

skeeter20205• 12 months ago

There's a lot of team culture going on here. I manage 6 scrum teams and attend each standup a few times a week. Some are very short and to the point; that's what the team wants. A few start with movie trivia or a silly question which takes ~5 minutes. One team spends 30 minutes and it's their daily social time for the ~22 minutes after updates.

I do like having an adult (rarely me!) in the room who shuts down OT rabbit holes and redirect to appropriate time & place.

These are all remote, geo-distributed teams who only see each other in person about once per year.

skeeter20205• 12 months ago

> "meeting without biscuits"

I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"

anotherevan• 12 months ago

"Very telling that English has a term for silly roles like 'stock broker' but not for important roles like 'casually brings homemade scones to every meeting'."

/src https://aus.social/@coolandnormal/109957560234997684

eschneider• 12 months ago

Agendas are critical is deciding a) do I care and b) can I help.

danjl2• 12 months ago

These days it is trivial to record the meeting and have it transcribed and then summarized by an LLM to produce "automatic" minutes. Searchability is a bonus.

stronglikedan3• 12 months ago

I find that a good way to get out of some meetings is to ask for an agenda up front (since one is hardly ever provided). I can usually reply to the agenda items with 90% of the info they are looking for, and then that spawns a short back and forth to hammer out the other 10% over email. It works more often than not, but not as much as I'd like.

HexPhantom3• 12 months ago

While standups often drift into ceremonial territory, the social/presence aspect isn't nothing

spauldo• 12 months ago

Tea party brings up images of little girls and stuffed animals around a table to my American mind, but I get what you mean.

My team has a weekly meeting with no management allowed and no agenda. I bring up anything important right at the start, then we go around and give everyone a chance to say what they're working on. No assignments are given out, but people who need help with something can ask and usually get it.

The main purpose of the meeting is to just keep everyone updated on what the rest of the team is doing and give us some water-cooler time. It makes up, in a small way, for the lack of personal interaction we have since going remote. I keep management out because I want us to be free to speak our minds.

The rest of our meetings are more formal and focused and get more actual work done, but without the "tea party" (I'm starting to like that term) we start losing cohesion as a team.

PeterStuer2• 12 months ago

"Meetings are primarily for two things:" ... "Brainstorming" ..., ... "Making a decision as a group" ... "Secondary" ... "to expand and clarify knowledge"

I've said this before,

The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.

The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.

You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?

As for the author's specific points:

Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.

"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".

"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting

holowoodman4• 12 months ago

Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.

To fix that, the moderator needs to do what I would call "round-robin brainstorming". Each other participant has to have made exactly one point (in seating order or spontaneously) before the first one can make another one. Everyone has to weigh in, and at least for the first 2 or 3 rounds, the moderator needs to enforce this. Usually by then, everyone has warmed up to the idea that their ideas are not that stupid after all, and participation is more equalized.

Edit: about your other points: yes, I agree.

izacus• 12 months ago

You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?

It's not only cynical, it's downright sociopathic if that's the sum of your opinion. Yes, even if you lay down the facts.

ianmcgowan2• 12 months ago

Parent comment is working from The Gervais Principle[1] of office politics. There are companies where that's an accurate description of reality, unpleasant though it might be.

[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

PeterStuer2• 12 months ago

Organisational sociopaths: Rarely challenged, often promoted. Why? [pdf] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242338489_Organisat...

Deconstructing the corporate psychopath: an examination of deceptive behavior https://www.emerald.com/rbf/article-abstract/10/2/163/368313...

imcritic• 12 months ago

Too many mistakes/typos in text.

That's a signal for me. A signal, that the author of this shit of an article didn't bother reading his own article before publishing it.

This article brings nothing new useful to the table. That's a rehash of someone else's rehash of something they've read somewhere.

elcapitan• 12 months ago

Maybe adding typos is now used as a positive signal that it wasn't written by a LLM.

gadders2• 12 months ago

"This meeting could have been an email." - yeah, if people actually read their emails.

matwood• 12 months ago

What’s the point when you know there will be a meeting about the topic?

gadders2• 12 months ago

"Dear XX, please tell me if you want to do x or y."

No response, resends email 2 or 3 times

Sends Invitation "Meeting to Agree whether X or Y."

XX replies to original email with an answer

Meeting is cancelled

vjvjvjvjghv3• 12 months ago

"Yeah, if people actually listened and contributed in meetings."

AndyMcConachie• 12 months ago

If there are no consequences for missing a meeting then I know I don't need to be in the meeting.

holowoodman4• 12 months ago

Btw, question to the wisdom of HN: Good meetings need minutes.

Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?

Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.

Cthulhu_2• 12 months ago

Well first off, do you actually need all that? How formal are these meetings?

Ours are pretty informal, we (unfortunately) use MS Teams which has an agenda & notes section; people are asked to fill in the agenda if they have any points (which is frustrating because getting there isn't easy or obvious), people can write down notes and action points during the meeting (it's a shared and collaborative effort).

You can assign tasks to people's todo lists though, but of course the problem is fragmentation; everyone has their own todo lists, there's Jira for work items, etc.

holowoodman4• 12 months ago

It sounds more formal than it should be. In my mind, it's more about easier searching and retracing steps and decisions. The only really formal thing in there is the list of TODOs and the DECISIONS. The first ones because obviously you need people to do them, and it's easier if they are automatically on a list of theirs and not forgotten. The DECISIONS are important because in retrospect somebody always will want to know the when/how/who/why around them.

But you could be right, this might not be the unifying tool for everything but more like number 29 that has never replace the previous 28...

jerf• 12 months ago

They're coming online with all this AI stuff. Zoom has an integrated one that I've used a few times, and even explicitly directed the AI to add things to the work items which has worked so far, though I haven't tried it very often to know how reliable that is.

But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.

danjl2• 12 months ago

Google Workspace tools, like Google Meet, can automatically transcribe the meeting, and then you can use AI (Gemini) to summarize and generate searchable minutes.

nxpnsv2• 12 months ago

Rant: I hate brainstorming meetings. A manager who wants to feel like they are doing something invite a mix of one or two experts, a clueless pm, engineers from an unrelated project, and handful of random ones hers. Next, with zero preparation we’re supposed to come up with groundbreaking new ideas. Then there is some voting and finally waiting for a summary or gameplay that’s postponed until the heat death of the universe. Perhaps I will bring cookies next time.

nunez• 12 months ago

I actually enjoy brainstorming meetings in-person. These actually feel like a "brainstorm" when they're done right.

Brainstorming meetings over Zoom, on the other hand...

nxpnsv2• 12 months ago

Ah yes, my hate is mostly for the kind of thing that happens on teams/miro.

yencabulator3• 12 months ago

Sounds like a very poorly run brainstorming session.

How to do it right (IMHO): Have several short but rambling hallway conversations about the upcoming topic for 3-4 days before. Take long showers and let your mind wander. Then do the brainstorming session.

cadamsdotcom• 12 months ago

Every meeting can be put in a category:

1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..

Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"

Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment

Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!

And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.

theideaofcoffee• 12 months ago

People seemed to be brainwashed into thinking that meetings are ... actually necessary. If people can build the Linux kernel without meetings, solely over email, then your $1.99 app, or your project requiring coordinating more than two people can be done the same way. Write it down, debate and argue in text so anyone interested can see what's going on. There's your minutes, your agenda, your invite for future ones right there. Now go back to work (or continue, since you didn't have to leave it in the first place) and stop bothering people.

I would praise any leader that has the courage to call the meeting spade a spade knowing they're just corporate-sanctioned babysitting exercises, myth to be discarded.

SpicyLemonZest• 12 months ago

The Linux kernel isn't a business. There's no 2025 revenue numbers they're hoping to hit with some cool new initiative, no high-paying customer threatening to run away to Windows if they don't get suchandsuch new kernel feature by end of quarter. It's a very different problem space, and these kind of business alignment problems are exactly the ones that are harder to resolve through email.

sunscream89• 12 months ago

I walked into nearly every meeting I ever attended with a list and my working journal. If I have something important to share I bring a few copies of my highlights or just list things about other activities that I care about.

I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.

As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.

dogleash• 12 months ago

I like the article, but there's a simpler underlying problem.

Are people calling meetings to yap, or with clear and concise goals?

Yappers do not understand the difference because their meetings are not bereft of articulable utility.

turnsout• 12 months ago

If you want to know about effective meetings, just read Traction and look into EOS.

nickdothutton• 12 months ago

In my experience, a lot of people call a meeting to try and make something happen. The thing _should_ be happening already but the team is not working efficiency in a well-thought-out manner. Rather than figure out what the real problem is with the working practices, or recognising some genuinely novel feature of the situation that is blocking progress, they resort just booking meeting after meeting until somehow it is resolved. I don't attend meetings without an agenda and at least a (sometimes optimistic) list of what the outputs of the meeting should be. Decision on X. Routes of investigation for Y. Outline plan on Z.

pflenker• 12 months ago

I have two separate points to add to this. Point 1. During the pandemic, I learned that meetings also support team cohesion. We experimented with less meetings, but quickly got to a point where we restored at least _some_ meetings to ensure we'd stay functional as a team. This still matters given that we're still working from home 60-80% of the time.

Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions: 1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting? 2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?

With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)

skeeter20205• 12 months ago

I agree with these, though the pandemic showed us (at least in my scenarios) online meetins really suck for a lot of the softer, agenda-less type activities. Casual, in-person hangs become AA meetings. It felt like we were sitting around a church basement on metal chairs (with the crappy coffee IRL too) waiting for our turn to speak. One of the good things IME was that scrum or dev-sized teams adopted extended pairing and group sessions; I saw (some) people get a lot better at working in public and sharing knowledge at this level.

The OP mentions it at the start, but I will reinforce: meetings suck if you're not prepared; use them to do work (like brain storm or make decisions) not share information. Breaking the "meeting as the big reveal" habit is surprisingly hard, but also solves the "should I attend?" question. To your point #2 a lot of that can be solved without attending if the appropriate prep and follow-up is covered. I don't really like RACI charts, but they do provide some value as a looser guide to thinking through the 2 questions you raise in point 2 above.

chasd00• 12 months ago

I’ve spent probably 60-70% of my day in meetings for the past 5 years. Article makes some good points. An agenda in the invite, moderator+the authority to tell _anyone_ on the call to stfu, minutes, and ending on time.

Some things I’d add: 1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting 2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates 3. A log of decisions made and by whom 4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.

Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.

duxup3• 12 months ago

agenda

I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.

I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.

Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.

I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.

throw-qqqqq2• 12 months ago

I’m in a company of +6k.

Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite

Same rule here, but enforced.

We are allowed (and encouraged) to cancel or decline invitations without an agenda here.

In my experience, it makes a big positive difference, when people have to justify why they need someone’s time and provide a rough frame for the discussion.

Much more focused, much more efficient. Fewer meeting where I think “I shouldn’t have joined”.

sitkack• 12 months ago

Is part of the agenda the outcomes desired, some could be a) gather feedback b) broadcast a new thing c) discuss and decide on next course of action ...

It would be nice if agendas explained each persons role in the outcome and what the exit conditions are for the meeting.

Scubabear68• 12 months ago

Yep.

Right now I am living the opposite, consulting to a huge company where anyone can convene huge meetings with no agendas, especially if they are a compliance person, or product person.

We have many, many meetings where many people have no idea what the meeting is about, or even worse they will talk about 3 or 4 different topics.

They also practice what I call Rumor Driven Development. It is not fun.

mcswell• 12 months ago

I get the "must have agenda" rule, and I'm all for enforcement of that rule, but how did they ensure that the agenda was contentful and meaningful? Not "(1) Convene and take roll, (2) Talk about projects, (3) Set do-outs." [or is it due-outs?]

camel_gopher• 12 months ago

No agenda, no attenda

theshrike796• 12 months ago

My record for an useless meeting was when the Lead Architect called an all-hands R&D meeting (40-50 people) for the whole morning (0800->1200)

It was him reading tickets off Jira and editing them and randomly asking people about clarifications.

I was a consultant at the time, billing around 100€/hour and there were others along with their own people. That meeting was a) completely useless for 95% of the people there and b) cost about 15k€ easily.

MSM• 12 months ago

Completely agree re:leadership.

I worked in a couple companies with the "agenda rule" but I worked at one company in particular where it was successful. In that company, leadership had a "no nonsense" type approach and it only took a few reply alls from leaders to meeting requests with "Where is the agenda?" for everyone to fall in line. It also helped that every meeting they sent out contained an agenda.

vjvjvjvjghv3• 12 months ago

An ex-director I worked for had a habit of sending out non-descript meeting requests for Friday afternoon. You never knew if it was was something trivial or layoff announcements. I think he enjoyed spreading panic among his people :-)

duxup3• 12 months ago

It's a power play for sure for some managers. It's also a very strong tell of a bad manager / someone who absolutely has character flaws that should disqualify them from being in management.

dsr_• 12 months ago

Way back when, the president of the company had a habit of sending out email on a Monday to schedule a company-wide meeting for Tuesday. These were weeks to months apart from each other.

Every single time, I wondered if it would be routine, or an acquisition, or a bankruptcy...

One day I mentioned my anxiety to him. He immediately apologized, and from then on, the company-wide meetings had agendas. Eventually that stopped -- when we started doing regular company-wide meetings with a standing agenda.

Sometimes everyone needs to communicate better. Without bug reports, what are you going to fix?

pavel_lishin• 12 months ago

I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership

All culture depends on leadership maintaining it. They have the power to not only set culture, mostly, but even more so they have the power to break culture. You can't have a bottom-up culture that'll withstand leadership ignoring or breaking it.

If leadership doesn't inspire trust, that'll spread through the rest of the company very quickly.

fellowniusmonk• 12 months ago

Companies that allow agenda free meetings are just begging for high control people to generate unnecessary meetings.

This can be dominating high control or anxious/disorganized high control, either way it's a waste of people time.

alach112• 12 months ago

Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings

As soon as I read this line I grimaced. This is a clear sign of an organization that doesn't respect peoples' time. The class should be an email (and proper follow-up by the management chain) establishing three rules:

- Meetings must have an agenda

- After a meeting, there must be a follow-up email describing what was decided and any action items

- Recurring meetings should be rare/exceptional

- Given good meeting notes and action items sent afterwards, reduce the invite list to decision makers; people who need to be informed can be added to the follow-up email

duxup3• 12 months ago

Sadly you're right. It was a good company but by that time it was being run by some folks who were put in charge to sell the company. Once they were in place most of the executive team seemed to be resume building with little initiates here or there.

I rode that train until I was fortunate enough to get a moderate buy out.

theshrike796• 12 months ago

The point of mandatory classes isn't about respecting time or being efficient.

It's there to make 100% clear that you can't say "I didn't know" when you do something that was explicitly explained in the online class.

So now if a new middle-manager has an agendaless meeting, nobody shows up and they throw a massive fit - people can point at the class and say "It's company policy, deal with it"

karaterobot• 12 months ago

It's got to be a good agenda, too. It can't just be "discuss delivery of project X" or "sync on status of feature Y". Those are too generic. The agenda needs to make it clear what the outcome of the meeting is, and who needs to be there.

I'm the only person I know of who writes real agendas for meetings at my company (which is only about 120 people). It's clearly not caught on, but I do it anyway almost as a protest at this point.

HexPhantom3• 12 months ago

Classic case of "do as I say, not as I calendar."

FuriouslyAdrift• 12 months ago

There are 2 kinds of meetings:

1. Briefings: meant to disseminate marching orders, find any last minute blockers/disagreements, and clarify any differences in interpretation of those marching orders. These should be infrequent, timed, and formal

2. Brainstorms: development meetings to identify, interpret, and develop action plans for problems, products, ideas, whatever. These should be frequent, open-ended, and informal

xivzgrev• 12 months ago

lol our company (1k+ employees) pretty much violates each item on this list

We typically don't take minutes. Advance agendas are often non existent. And we definitely put a premium on presenting vs written comms

And yes it leads to a lot of FOMO / meetings.

motohagiography• 12 months ago

It feels rude to leave the meeting before it’s done

It's not rude to leave a meeting if there is a competent chair who can set clear beginnings and endings to topics and MC while people enter and exit during transitions.

neogodless• 12 months ago

Working on reading this, the first thing that struck me was that it reflects something that started ~15 years ago at Best Buy.

https://slate.com/business/2014/05/best-buys-rowe-experiment...

"Results-Only Work Environment" (ROWE) encapsulated treating employees as responsible adults, and letting them make decisions about what they needed to do to get work done, including declining any meetings that wouldn't contribute to productivity.

https://www.gorowe.com/

rwmj• 12 months ago

Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories[...] For example; written text.

A worthy goal. However I know several people who are apparently unable (or unwilling) to read anything, and instead default to calling a meeting for any sort of communication or knowledge transfer.

lenerdenator• 12 months ago

Don't go over.

Ever.

Also keep the meeting to a 50 minute max.

javier_e062• 12 months ago

The human brain hates meetings. It sees people. Tall, short, poorly dressed, overly dressed, it sees the sittings arrangements, someone with the arms crossed, someone is laughing, wait, are we here to talk about technical issues? They want answers now? Why now? Someone is not happy, why? Someone has a question, is Dan, probably something obvious..

That is not how the human brain works. To believe a creative mind is in problem-solving mode when sequestered into 1 hour or 30 minutes social gathering is bizarre. The best technical interactions I've seen happened randomly at a lab when everybody else has left for the day or while at hike chat on a trail during lunch time.

stronglikedan3• 12 months ago

Who is Dan?

javier_e062• 12 months ago

Nobody knows, he gets invited to every meeting and ask stupid questions, I heard he is a consultant, can't confirm, he works on the other building, corporate.

chias• 12 months ago

Someone who is strong, like you.

yencabulator3• 12 months ago

One of my rules of thumb is that every single one of the meeting participants should have individually prepared for at least as long as the meeting is, or it's a public announcement or training and not a meeting.

If you can't get someone to commit to that, it sounds like you don't need them in the meeting anyway.

cek• 12 months ago

I know this is HN, and my instincts tell me posters here predominately are either ICs or managers "in the small" (line level, or at the most at the scale of the OP, in which the company is ~300).

That said, asserting that most meetings are either brainstorming or decision making, is naive. When an organization grows beyond ~100-150 people (Dumbar's Number) the org must metastasize into smaller, "self-contained", orgs that are far less than that number. Once this happens, there is need for meetings that drive accountability, closure, and alignment at scale. For example, monthly or quarterly business reviews.

These are NOT brainstorming meetings or decision-making meetings. They are meetings where leadership drives accountability and alignment by ensuring light is shined (in a way visible cross-org) on the right topics for the biz.

HexPhantom3• 12 months ago

The best part is shifting the mindset from "everyone should attend everything just in case" to "trust the system, read the minutes, and show up when it actually matters." That alone could rescue hours of deep work time each week.

JensRantil• 12 months ago

Sending a single representative of a team to a meeting is one of favourite hacks. And then have that representative report back.

nitwit005• 12 months ago

At least for the efficient part of this, I've always felt the fix is just a display of the estimated cost of the meeting (perhaps an average or lower bound to avoid revealing pay).

The same people who will fuss over $20 lunch expense limits will happily spend thousands on meetings without a thought.

What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?

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