Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

- Be ruthless about when you need to have a meeting. Its generally only if you need three or more decision-makers to come to a consensus on a strategy to solve some problem.

- Be ruthless about who you invite; it's usually only people who have something explicitly to contribute or who you know wish to be included.

- One person leading/driving the discussion, making sure to keep things on topic and within timeframes.

- A clearly defined agenda and goal, ideally written up in the invite message.

- Take very brief notes of decisions made and immediate actions, conclude with a rundown of these and follow up with them by email.

Effective meetings are hard. I struggle moderating them constantly. Here’s what I learnt:

- Be clear about the purpose of the meeting - is it knowledge sharing, is it to kick people’s butts to progress towards a goal, is it to build camaraderie, etc. Information sharing can be much looser in structure, a project meeting needs to be run with a more tight agenda. A social meeting should be relaxed and have avenues to break the ice

- Always keep meeting minutes (unless it’s a social focused meeting) and write down who will do what afterwards (and follow up on those points). Even if the first few times it’s unsuccessful, eventually it will improve overall discipline. However sometimes it’s an uphill battle that can’t be won - imperfection is okay, people are lazy and won’t do everything they agreed to do in a time manner. Just push them in the right direction

- Focus on the important things, make sure they are covered off in the meeting. Thus, meeting prep is vital - plan the interactions as much as possible in your head and write the goal you want to achieve from the meeting

- Don’t hold unnecessary meetings. Respect people’s time as much as possible

- Practice makes perfect. There are so many combinations of types of meetings that you just need to develop a feel for them

- Try and understand the personalities of who is attending. This will give you strategies to make the meeting more effective. For example a decision maker who never replies to emails and takes too long to make a decision - you want to pin them down in the meeting and gently pressure them to come to a conclusion, because once the meeting is over, they will spend another week procrastinating! Others like to work together and chat more, for them, meetings help give energy to move towards common goals. Others are less social and want to focus on doing work, those meetings should be much more concise and direct

Hope that helps

For 5) I feel it is hard. Often there are expectations that you join meetings just in case a higher-up manager needs a piece of information or I am afraid to loose out on critical information. Do you, in your organization, have an active meeting culture with feedback for meetings? It feels to me that in my organization too often when a conflict, next steps or any other decision is needed, instead of writing about it people just schedule meetings to discuss things. And then there are meetings where people just share information ("team meetings") that could be shared in writing much more efficiently (people read faster than others talk, so reading information is often more efficient from my point of view).

Two quick frameworks that you might find helpful:

1) The POST method, to give clarity at the beginning of a meeting: Purpose: What is the purpose of the meeting? Objective: What are you trying to achieve in the meeting, and what does success look like? Structure: What is the structure of the meeting we are having? Timing: How much time is allocated to the meeting?

https://gist.github.com/aaronbuchanan/2dcf936daceab925da61

I like this because it helps give quick context, also the mnemonic is quite handy.

2) Try to structure your meeting around other people's questions: - Going from basic what questions working up to why we need to make a decision, how they might be impacted etc. - I wrote a short post about it here: https://www.logikblok.com/supporting-asking-questions

I like this because it focuses your communication around your audience/user needs.

Aside from that and keeping everyone on the same track of discussion / time / documenting agreements all help out. Hope that helps.

If you call in a meeting:

- Have a clear picture of what you try to achieve with it.

- Communicate the purpose of the meeting in advance.

- Moderate the meeting to make sure that its participants actively contribute towards its goal. That is, if the meeting digresses, politely address it and make a constructive proposal on when and how to address the topic that caused the digression.

If you are being called into a meeting:

- Ask for what you can contribute to the goal of the meeting if it is not clear.

- Take responsibility in working towards the goal of the meeting.

This is hard work and I'm having enough Zoom fatigue so that I do not follow these guidelines myself at times but I try. I'm curious what others bring up.