Ask HN: How do you run better meetings? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

#71

Post by ecesena » Wed, Apr 21, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

contingencies wrote: post #3

Run less or no meetings. If you have to run meetings, consider the option to temporarily institute an approval process by senior management whereby the thesis for any meeting (proposed agenda, attendees, etc.) is first proposed in private. Then senior management has the opportunity to ask questions and give feedback. This alone will force those convening to think twice. If necessary, quantify the cost of the meeting…

I agree on the premise to minimize meetings.

On the specifics of the meetings I've implemented 2 things:

1) Offer no-video meetings, maybe for 1:1 if you don't need to screen share. Be the first to go on a walk or be away from keyboard, to encourage others (especially new team members) to do it as well. Clearly I'm not sayin ALL 1:1, face time also has value, use your judgement.

2) Include a bit of non-working life. The way we were running our weekly sync was talk quickly about what you did/didn't last week (especially to catch blockers), share what's your plan for this coming week, share something you did during the weekend. 8-10 people, 30min.

Re: Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

#72

Post by Minor49er » Thu, Apr 22, 2021, 2:03 AM UTC

Bluepacsky wrote: post #36

Minor49er wrote: post #24

>How do you handle meeting feedback for meetings by others to make sure it is not just a random meeting with talking, no agenda, no clear outcomes and mainly information sharing? Easy. (Or at least easier said than done.) Only initiate/attend a meeting if one or more of these things are clearly defined before the meeting even takes place. It can be helpful to approach it like you would a ticket or a to-do at work: id…

All these points are very true. But let's say you are in a large international organization, competing audiences etc. How you handle political concerns when someone schedule an unnecessary meeting? Can you just tell them straight-ahead? I often find that for many people it is easier to initiate a meeting than rather to share information in written form (that would their work to prepare, while for a meeting everybody…

Sorry for the delay in response. What do you mean in particual by political concerns?

If I'm understanding the situation correctly, if the company is large and spread far apart, an employee should be able to reach out to the leads of other teams, explain what it is that they hope to accomplish with the meeting, and ask the leads to invite anyone else who may either contribute to it or get something out of it. That said, even just pinging those people ahead of time with the question of "do we need to have a meeting about this? / Would this meeting be useful?" can go a long way in either refining the agenda or cancelling the meeting altogether. Depending on the organization, of course.

Re: Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

#73

Post by _fool » Fri, Apr 23, 2021, 2:41 AM UTC

Bluepacsky wrote: post #21

_fool wrote: post #12

These are probably the two best interesting aka "seemingly not in wide use" ideas we've tried, with great results: - create a culture of actually RSVP'ing for meetings (yes or no!) so that people know who will be in a call and you don't waste 5 minutes wondering if X will be joining or if anyone will be joining at all. Pairs best with a culture of actually being on time for meetings and ending on time (so you can all…

I really appreciate the second point and the mentioned ideas! That is great advise. I think having everybody write status updates in advance can be a great idea but how do you make sure that does not turn out to be more work than just sharing those updates verbally in the meeting?

It's not that it's less work!

By one measure it's "more work" - if you think about the time that each person spends creating their content in advance, vs what they could spend wall clock time talking in the meeting - 30 min meeting can only have thirty minutes of talking - vs N x 10min pre-writing. It's just parallelizable outside of the tiny synchronous need as the mutex is passed, and a better use of everyone's time - you can write the status update any time before the meeting, whenever you have downtime.

Re: Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

#74

Post by shalmanese » Sun, Apr 25, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

n4r9 wrote: post #69

shalmanese wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not). We dealt with this in the zoom era by having some people present but not paying attention. They would join the meeting but then turn the sound off and do their own thing. If we needed their input on something, then we…

I quite like this and I feel like you could go one better and have optional people be "on call" during the meeting i.e. they should be available to ring in if needed.

We tried that initially and there was just a bit too much friction involved in them finding the zoom link and then joining and then getting their mic connected and everything. It was easier to just have them join the meeting in the beginning and be muted so it was ~5s for them to hop into a convo.