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Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#51

Post by zhte415 »

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…

With 400 emails per day the last thing I'd want to do is add another time-waster on approving a meeting and collecting feedback on it, meeting minutes are sufficient.

I far prefer to let people self-organise and foster that culture plus weekly or bi-weekly 1-1s. Nothing is anonymous in an organisation.. you can recognise people by terms, grammar. Then.. having people do a survey on a meeting, every meeting?, is squaring the problem so.. a 1 hour meeting of 10 people, 10 hours, results in 2 minutes feedback time per person, 20 additional minutes, plus associated time to rant about someone else i.e. one's self, and then to deal with that passive-aggressive rant rather than sticking this emotional response into the 1-1 when someone's had time to reflect.

Madness.

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

#52

Post by Jugurtha »

Recycling some replies. More context on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26182988:

Pick and choose (especially meeting notes, alignment, and the links on the bottom about video calls):

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19924100 (understanding codebases, etc.)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591067 (testing pipelines, scaffolding, issue templates)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22873103 (making the most out of meetings, leveraging your presence)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22827841 (product development)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20356222 (giving a damn)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25008223 (If I disappear, what will happen)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24972611 (about consulting and clients, but you can abstract that as "stakeholders", and understanding the problem your "client", who can be your manager, has.)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24209518 (on taking notes. When you're told something, or receive a remark, make sure to make a note and learn from it whether it's a mistake, or a colleague showing you something useful, or a task you must accomplish.. don't be told things twice or worse. Be on the ball and reliable).

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24503365 (product, architecture, and impact on the team)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22860716 (onboarding new hires to a codebase, what if it were you, improve code)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22710623 (being efficient learning from video, hacks. Subsequent reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22723586)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21598632 (communication with the team, and subsequent reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21614372)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21427886 (template for taking minutes of meetings to dispatch to the team. Notes are in GitHub/GitLab so the team can access them, especially if they haven't attended).

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24177646 (communication, alignment)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21808439 (useful things for the team and product that add leverage)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20323660 (more meeting notes. Reply to a person who had trouble talking in corporate meetings)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715971 (management involvement as a spectrum)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25922120 (researching topics)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26147502 (keeping up with a firehose of information)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26123017 (fractal communication: communication that can penetrate several layers of management and be relevant to people with different profiles and skillsets)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26179539 (remote work, use existing tooling and build our own. Jitsi videos, record everything, give access to everyone so they can reference them and go back to them, meetings once a week or two weeks to align)

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

#53

Post by globular-toast »

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…

> Scheduling-wise, optimize meetings for less productive periods (late afternoon, first thing in the morning pre-coffee, right after lunch, etc.).

Wait, you just mentioned all times. I'm most productive late in the afternoon. Not everyone is the same.

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

#54

Post by g_p »

contingencies wrote: post #44
Bluepacsky wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the general idea of having less meetings. I try to cut time down for meetings I am responsible for. 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). 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes…

deal with inefficient meeting culture Use an auto-transcription service. If presence is required, try to get a real time system going and flag keywords. That way you can alternate task your way to the important bits without dedicated mental bandwidth. The nice thing about this is you just need the system audio feed, muted, as the input which by definition works with all conferencing platforms.

One thing businesses should be aware of here, if they go for this, is the legal risk that such transcripts end up being disclosed in a legal discovery process. Most businesses wouldn't want every word that's said in a meeting to be recorded and stored "forever" (which it likely is, if you use a third party cloud based tool).

Also, if you do go for an external tool, there's now someone outside your organisation with a recording and transcript of every meeting you've used this for... That's a potential goldmine - not the kind of company you want you see acquired or merging in the future.

Maybe people's expectations will change due to so many online meetings, but under normal circumstances, I can't imagine many legal teams would want the risk of a third party transcription tool listening in.

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

#55

Post by majewsky »

muffa wrote: post #49

What worked the best in my experience is to have an agenda. Having an agenda with time-slots for each bullet point makes it easier for everyone to get their voices heard instead of having a lone ranger talking nonstop about their favorite subject for 1h non-stop. In short: - Have an agenda with time-slots - The meeting organizer is the one in charge of sticking the meeting to the agenda. When someone goes off-topic s…

> Avoid the small-talk that can be done before or after the meeting, not everyone in a meeting wants to know about how many goals you're kid score this last Saturday.

With all the pandemic-induced social isolation, we saw the small-talk creep into meetings more and more in our team. What works well for us is to have a dedicated recurring meeting just for small-talk. We have it twice a week in the morning, when everyone is just drinking their first coffee of the day and not up to much yet anyway, so it doesn't seem to be taking too much productive time away.

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

#56

Post by prepend »

I spend about 5-10 minutes putting together an agenda that includes references to background context, purpose, and expected outcome.

If the background material is essential I include a prep time estimate.

I decline meetings that are unclear what they are and say why. If the agenda is sparse or I don’t understand why it’s taking an hour, I suggest 30 or 15 minutes, etc

I connect in 2-3 minutes early for some zoom chitchat before the meeting starts.

When I see good agendas, prep, organization in a meeting, I verbally tell people how their meeting prep materials helped me.

I always leave my camera on as it helps me when I can see others to tell when they are about to talk, when they are multitasking or when they look bored or even step away.

I’m not sure how to set up org culture, but I figure by modeling and testing out different approaches it helps.

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

#57

Post by 100011_100001 »

prepend wrote: post #56

I spend about 5-10 minutes putting together an agenda that includes references to background context, purpose, and expected outcome. If the background material is essential I include a prep time estimate. I decline meetings that are unclear what they are and say why. If the agenda is sparse or I don’t understand why it’s taking an hour, I suggest 30 or 15 minutes, etc I connect in 2-3 minutes early for some zoom chit…

Mind sharing an example of what your meeting agenda looks like?

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

#58

Post by decafninja »

josephorjoe wrote: post #41

If you have people in your meeting who do not meaningfully contribute or learn something valuable that could not have been learned from a shared document, you have wasted their time. So, ask: Did everyone in the meeting contribute or learn something they couldn't learn by reading? If the answer is 'no', there were too many people in the meeting or it should not have happened at all. I've been in so many hour long mee…

This rings so true for me.

Depends on your org, but I bet some of those developers wish they were back at their desks working, because it's a waste of time for them. The reason they're probably there is because they feel it would look bad for them if they were absent.

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

#59

Post by decafninja »

magicalhippo wrote: post #37
ipnon wrote: post #31

The simplest solution is to make all meetings optional. Then people will stop going to meetings that are not useful to them. You will be forced to find better solutions to the problems your meetings were solving sub-optimally. Many meetings are used to simply coordinate activity. This can easily be done through asynchronous communication using email or instant messaging.

If I'm called into a meeting and I don't see a clear need for me there, I'll ask why I was invited. Usually there's a reason, but often it's just cause a question might come up that I can answer or similar. In those cases I'll let them know they can poke me if they really need me and then I'll join for whatever they need. Thankfully my boss has understood that the less he's in our way the more we get done, so this wo…

One of the best things a manager can do for their engineering team is insulate them away from all the pointless bureacracy in the org - including most meetings.

My boss is fantastic at this. I feel sorry for him, but also highly respect him. He goes into a stupid, pointless, hour-long meeting where only 3 minutes of content is relevant to us. Of course our entire team was invited and nominally expected to attend. He pushes back saying we're busy. He comes back and relays those 3 minutes of important content while suffering through 57 minutes of droll.

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