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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

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Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#151

Post by rkomorn »

A_Duck wrote: post #144

For fully remote workers, that few minutes chat before the meeting starts is one of the few opportunities for unstructured chat with their colleagues

I think unstructured chat with colleagues is undervalued, though I also respect people who want no part of it.

At one place where we were remote, we had a morning daily (I don't care to argue the usefulness of dailies, though).

When I joined as an IC, I added an emphatically-optional 15 minute "coffee chat" meeting preceding it on the same video chat link. Most people pretty consistently joined at some point before the start of the daily. Sometimes chat was about work, most often, it was just social.

IMO, it was worth it. It was low friction because it was next to a scheduled meeting at a time where a morning beverage was reasonable, and people felt no pressure to join.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#152

Post by al_borland »

recursive wrote: post #10

> there is social pressure not to allow meetings to run much past the top of the hour. I've never seen this pressure. > meetings rarely started on the dot anyway before this change. It's like I live in an entirely different world. Start meetings when they say they're going to start. People will learn to show up quickly. I think that works better than trying to psychologically game people into cooperation. That just s…

A team I once ran made rules their meetings would end 5 minutes early, to create some space. We didn’t have the power to change the whole org, but we could control team meetings to create space before other meetings. Since the whole team was on board with this, there was always someone who would call out that it was time for the meeting to end, to prevent them running long.

At the same time, we had a rule that meetings would start when they say they start. This was after being incredibly frustrated by a guy on another team who would schedule his meetings to start on the hour, but then display a message that said we’d start at 5 after, to give people time to join, assuming other meetings would run long. This felt like he was wasting everyone’s time who showed up on time, and had the net effect of everyone showing up late to his meetings. If people learned they should show up late to his meetings, they can learn to show up on time to our meetings. Then we can stop waiting around hoping that everyone shows up. When someone shows up late to a meeting that’s already well underway, that sends a strong signal that they should be on time for the next one.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#154

Post by al_borland »

chatmasta wrote: post #66
exegete wrote: post #6

We do this at my work and guess what - meetings tend to run 5 minutes late because everyone knows the next meeting doesn’t start until 5 past.

Isn’t the point of TFA that meetings _unavoidably_ run 5 minutes late, and so starting at 0:05 will avoid being impacted by the previous meeting? I see two flaws: 1) This only works as long as nobody else does it. If the meeting prior to yours follows the same strategy then you’re in the same position as today 2) it starts 5 minutes later but has no plan for ending 5 minutes earlier, which means the next meeting will…

Meetings running over is avoidable. People just need to stop enabling bad behavior.

I work with a PM who is notorious for meetings running long. People just start hanging up while she’s talking if they have another meeting to go to. When she start hearing a bunch of beeps of people leaving, she starts to get the message that she needs to continue on the next meeting and stop. People are tired of it and don’t entertain it anymore, as much as she keeps trying to talk.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#155

Post by al_borland »

bialpio wrote: post #99
block_dagger wrote: post #86

How about just be punctual, respecting the time others have agreed to meet with you? Simpler solution than what this article suggests. People will abuse that system just the same anyway.

How do you plan to show up on time if one of your meetings ends at 2pm, the next one starts at 2pm, the meeting rooms are 3 floors apart, and you need to go to the restroom because you've been in meetings since lunch and need to pee? You're going to clone yourself?

Tell the people in the first meeting at the start that you’ll need to leave a few minutes early, to set the expectation and make sure any important stuff is done early. Then when it hits your transition window, politely tell them you have to run and leave.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#158

Post by mazone »

I don't remember the last time i had a meeting that was productive. Last time i worked in the office, the hallway discussions where the productive ones and now working remote most of the time is just being able to work with good people that understand text and work by messages that works good. Even video meetings with good people tends to be waste of time.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#159

Post by randallsquared »

For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".

But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.

It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#160

Post by earino »

tanvach wrote: post #75

During the pandemic, we had a natural experiment at my previous company. Our org had started an org wise auto ‘meeting starts 5 minute past’ while others had the traditional meetings start on the hour. Also conveniently, we also had the calendar data for internal meetings, internal VC software (not zoom) db that logs the participants when they join and leave meetings and employee function db. I was serendipitously th…

What joy to bump into you in the comments section! I definitely preferred 5 minutes past, but my calendar was pretty awful.

What was really awful, however, was when your calendar was a random mishmash of starts at :00, :05, :30 and :35 :-)

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