I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.
Agreed but it also applies to standups. I think if you just want ambient awareness, have people post their daily "what I did/will do" to Slack. No need to derail every single day for half an hour or more.
No one is going to admit in writing on slack that they are stuck. In person it's a lot easier to call people out.
I call your BS call :) There is nothing better than a day with nicely spaced meetings My current Project on every second wednesday: 10:00-10:30 Daily Standup 11:00-12:00 Architect Jour Fix 12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak 13:00-14:00 Sprint Retro 15:00-16:00 Sprint Planning Most of the gaps have a reason (conflicting meetings, etc) We use those gaps to "transfer knowledge". That basically means we sit in the cafeteria chatting…
>12:00-12:30 Lunchbreak Too short. An hour or bust. Actually, I am quite serious about. It's great to have time, go out and eat - business lunch in the area are decent to put it mildly.
For perspective: the people cooking your business lunch probably don't get a break of any kind, let alone a 30 or 60 minute lunch.
One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email. It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication. Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack chann…
This is a criticism of slack rather than an appraisal of meetings.
There's an interesting hatred of meetings by software engineers, and I think it's to far on the hatred spectrum. There's definitely a lot to hate about meetings and they are very poorly run in general. But the argument of "when do you do actual work!" is not a good one. If you run an organization of 200 people, it's a lot more effective for 25 people to spend all of their time making the efficiency of the team, and i…
Coding takes an enormous amount of concentration and headspace. Meetings are context switches that make retaining focus much harder. That’s why coders hate them.
If you’re a meeting maker, one thing to consider is that a one hour meeting for eight people is equivalent (maybe at a minimum) to 12 hours work. Ask yourself, if I could achieve what that meeting will achieve by spending 12 hours working alone in a room, would I see that as a good use of my time? Because that’s what you’re doing. Meetings had better be damn important and genuinely require active participation from all attendees.
Since this is Swedish study, I just want to point out that Swedish organizational culture is very meeting and consensus oriented. Nordic cultures may seem very similar, but their organizational cultures are different even within the same company. Others are often frustrated about Swedes and their endless meetings. Finns in the meeting are 'OK. lets do this.' and Swedes reply 'But Jan-Erik has not shared his point of…
This explains so much!
I was recently working on an infrastructure deployment with a team in Sweden and those of us from the US could not understand why everything took a commitee to do anything outside the norm.
Like, no individual would just do a task or make a command decision unless a broader team was engaged.
Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this. As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that. Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
And I thought a few extra vipers was bad! I can't even imagine the level of ensuing bullshit...
Properly designing incentive systems in a realm of pervasive externalities and nonobvious costs and benefits is difficult.
I'm not saying the market/cost approach is necessarily the best or appropriate. But it's an interesting thought experiment to work through it.
Sometimes imposing arbitrary requirements (e.g., "have an agenda") is a cheaper way of effecting the same ends. Though Goodhart's Law is another pitfall.
So true! I work across Scandinavia and there are definitely more consensus forming meetings in Sweden than elsewhere, even. Having previously worked in US & UK companies I'm still not used to it and I often feel like banging my head against the table and crying out "Will somebody please make a decision!". But of course this is Sweden, no single person will make a decision. I'm sure they think I'm terribly rude.
Heh sounds like you've maybe run across something quantified in the Hofstede leadership studies, commissioned by IBM when they first wanted to become an international globocorp. What you're feeling is the difference between a collectivist leadership culture and an individualist leadership culture. Collectivist cultures value leaders who generate power through _maintaining relationships_, whereas individualist leaders…
Thanks for sharing. It's certainly food for thought. I was trying to picture this sort of leadership by consensus applied in different parts of the world where I've lived. Although it might work with some success in a few places, in most I could only foresee catastrophe. Then I was reminded that Sweden has a really good education system. Maybe there's another lesson to draw here, that in order for consensus (democracy?) to work, it's worth ensuring that the minds that will voice their perspective actually have the ability to work out the issues.