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Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

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Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#211

Post by RaftPeople »

al_borland wrote: post #155
bialpio wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And have some subset of people in each mtg do that every mtg every single day?

I personally prefer the 5 minute gap, it's a simple and clean solution.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#212

Post by hnlmorg »

subtlejellyfish wrote: post #198
hnlmorg wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The term isn’t used to define everyone who isn’t a manager. It’s used to define people like Lead and Principle Engineers who are a subject matter expert, have influence in defining a project, but have chosen to continue in engineering roles rather than switching to management. Often their position in the company is parallel to the managers rather than subordinates, hence the “individual” part of the term. ICs are gen…

This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions. Ideally, managers manage people, IC execute and you get the "right" people in the room to make decisions, regardless of title or track.

> This requires the intentionality of the organization though. They seem to default to managers make the decisions.

if a company doesn’t intend to utilise IC then they don’t have ICs, just regular software engineers.

An IC is only an IC if the organisation is structured to utilise them as an IC. It isn’t a job title, it’s more to do with how an individual is utilised in a company. It’s their placement in the org structure.

> IC execute

IC plus engineers execute. IC are a subset of engineers.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#213

Post by dataflow »

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…

Between ICs and managers, which ones more commonly left the meeting room early vs. on time/late?

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#214

Post by antisthenes »

The problem with these kinds of advices is that it requires ALL teams to have buy-in to this idea.

As soon as a few teams start booking meetings on the hour or half-hour, this whole idea goes out the window and downsides begin to outweigh the positives.

The other downside, as others have mentioned, is that eventually meetings begin to run late.

The best advice about meeting is, in my opinion:

1. Don't have back to back meetings

2. Try to have at least 1 clear point for the agenda

3. Give at least some heads up. Don't pull people into meetings suddenly.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#215

Post by Andys »

crazygringo wrote: post #180
teamonkey wrote: post #149

I want Teams to show me the dollar cost of meetings. Enter an approximation of the average salary for people involved in the meeting, multiplied by the number of people in the meeting, and broadcast the cost ticking up every second to every person in the meeting. I don’t think anything else will be ans effective at reducing the number of meetings, reducing the length of meetings and reducing the number of people who…

I've worked a place that tried it. It does nothing. It's a random number that nobody cares about. Everyone quickly concludes that running a company is expensive and gets used to that. It's not their money, after all. They don't get to spend the saved money on a fancy lunch or something. It's just more money going into the pockets of owners/investors. People have meetings because there's a need for a decision that req…

I came to a similar conclusion. What about measuring enjoyment? Turns out people enjoy meetings more than work!

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#216

Post by barrucadu »

nephihaha wrote: post #208
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…

* During the lockdown. Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.

Was the lockdown not during the pandemic?

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#217

Post by benhurmarcel »

rendaw wrote: post #50
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.

Meeting software should eject everyone when the time is reached.

This is a bad idea. We used a software that did this for a while, and everybody scheduled meetings 30 minutes longer than necessary and specified the real time in the description, just to avoid cutting people off mid sentence.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#218

Post by nephihaha »

barrucadu wrote: post #216
nephihaha wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* During the lockdown. Covid is supposed to have started in October 2019, and no one locked down until nearly six months later.

Was the lockdown not during the pandemic?

It was six months after it started and arguably after it ended.

Re: Start your meetings at 5 minutes past

#219

Post by pixl97 »

onion2k wrote: post #168
steve1977 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the best approach is simply to have as few meetings as possible.

People don't know what 'as few as possible' means though. It needs to be clearer than that. As a rule I encourage my reports to consider: - Does it even need to be a meeting? Keeping meetings to things that need 'a discussion or decision', and keeping updates and announcements to chat or email works fairly well. - Does the meeting give you any value, or do you bring value to it? If both are no they should decline it.…

>much happier to skip a meeting if they'll still hear about what happens afterwards.

If you're just a 'follower' of what's going on, that's fine. The problem shows up when you have some stakeholder or steering ability.

If you miss meeting about X and don't bring up discussion about Y then other person A may not talk about Z that affects X. But I agree that every meeting should have a point and total number of meetings should be minimized.

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