71–80 of 147 posts
1. Briefings: meant to disseminate marching orders, find any last minute blockers/disagreements, and clarify any differences in interpretation of those marching orders. These should be infrequent, timed, and formal
2. Brainstorms: development meetings to identify, interpret, and develop action plans for problems, products, ideas, whatever. These should be frequent, open-ended, and informal
>agenda I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite. I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings. Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership. I think se…
> Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite
Same rule here, but enforced.
We are allowed (and encouraged) to cancel or decline invitations without an agenda here.
In my experience, it makes a big positive difference, when people have to justify why they need someone’s time and provide a rough frame for the discussion.
Much more focused, much more efficient. Fewer meeting where I think “I shouldn’t have joined”.
We typically don't take minutes. Advance agendas are often non existent. And we definitely put a premium on presenting vs written comms
And yes it leads to a lot of FOMO / meetings.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What’s the point when you know there will be a meeting about the topic?
"Dear XX, please tell me if you want to do x or y." No response, resends email 2 or 3 times Sends Invitation "Meeting to Agree whether X or Y." XX replies to original email with an answer Meeting is cancelled
My former boss wanted to have regular meetings because otherwise it is too easy for cross department projects to fall behind. Nobody prioritizes it, so things will not get done. It (should) cause some amount of embarrassment to go to the weekly meeting for N weeks and say you have still not done X task.
At 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
Depending on how it was implemented, might also be possible to unblind people’s salary. A big no-no for a big corporation where there might be laughable pay disparity.
>agenda I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite. I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings. Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership. I think se…
I worked in a couple companies with the "agenda rule" but I worked at one company in particular where it was successful. In that company, leadership had a "no nonsense" type approach and it only took a few reply alls from leaders to meeting requests with "Where is the agenda?" for everyone to fall in line. It also helped that every meeting they sent out contained an agenda.
It's not rude to leave a meeting if there is a competent chair who can set clear beginnings and endings to topics and MC while people enter and exit during transitions.
People seemed to be brainwashed into thinking that meetings are ... actually necessary. If people can build the Linux kernel without meetings, solely over email, then your $1.99 app, or your project requiring coordinating more than two people can be done the same way. Write it down, debate and argue in text so anyone interested can see what's going on. There's your minutes, your agenda, your invite for future ones ri…
The Linux kernel isn't a business. There's no 2025 revenue numbers they're hoping to hit with some cool new initiative, no high-paying customer threatening to run away to Windows if they don't get suchandsuch new kernel feature by end of quarter. It's a very different problem space, and these kind of business alignment problems are exactly the ones that are harder to resolve through email.
Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time. Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating…
https://slate.com/business/2014/05/best-buys-rowe-experiment...
"Results-Only Work Environment" (ROWE) encapsulated treating employees as responsible adults, and letting them make decisions about what they needed to do to get work done, including declining any meetings that wouldn't contribute to productivity.
See also: https://thetreehousepartners.com/review-rowe-results-work-en...