What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
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Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#2Seems 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.
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#3This 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.
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#4This 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.
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
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#5At 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.
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#6this 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?
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#7I 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.
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#8At 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.
Shopify did this - it’s frightening when you see the numbers across your entire org
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#9Great 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”
Re: What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
#10First, 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.