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No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

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Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#251

Post by Quothling »

bartread wrote: post #177
Quothling wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your take on working remote and how it can hinder spontaneous "group creativity", though I'd argue that the loss of the smoke break did a lot more damage to this than remote work. With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time. It's always some project manager or business process or whatever person who wants to talk abou…

> With that out of the way I just want to say that in decades I've never had a "quick call" which wasn't a humongous waste of my time. I don't know about that. I tend to find that incoming "quick calls" with peers, even where they've turned out to be anything but quick, tend to be at least reasonably useful. People do always ask first as well, rather than calling out of the blue. Overall though, I find working as an…

I'm almost always in the office. I basically only work from home when I'm going to do something that isn't work where it would be inconvenient for me to leave the office. Like if I have a dentist appointment at 11 am, or the daycare has some event at 2pm... That sort of stuff. It's not that I mind working from home, it's that I prefer working with people. That doesn't mean I don't get "quick calls" though. Even from people in the building... I guess that maybe some of the "quick calls" from people who work from home may actually be because they're a tad lonely now that I think about it.

It takes 15 minutes on a bike to get to my office though. When it took me an hour I worked from home quite a lot.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#252

Post by daghamm »

Leynos wrote: post #199
daghamm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I tell my reports to decline meeting requests unless the invitations include an agenda and a clear goal." We have a team that works this way 100% of the time, assuming the invitation is not coming from higher management. They are always the last to deliver and the team with the most critical bugs. If you don't make time for back channel sync, you will become an isolated island and your product will eventually suffer…

How so? There is no excuse for sending a meeting invite without an explanation as to what will be discussed or what you hope to achieve. That just results in aimless meetings that either have too many unnecessary attendees or missing people who do need to attend. When someone asks you to provide an agenda for a meeting, do you really just ignore them?

I don't know, but let me hypothesise.

When you work with complex stuff, there will always be one or two urgent meetings where the caller doesn't have time or the data to set up a proper agenda.

A meeting invite saying "oh shit, all hands on deck" does not need to be due to bad planning. Obviously this should not be the norm, but when it happens you cannot simply instruct your people to ignore it.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#253

Post by jstimpfle »

nottorp wrote: post #241
jstimpfle wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that 1) everything from the chat is immediately present in the brain when taking up the discussion at a later point, as well as 2) Last time you left the chat, all the the relevant context was well encoded as chat text in the first place?

I thought writing things down, even in a chat, helps a lot with both points? All this time I've been writing wrong...

It's certainly better to have chat text than to not have it, but whether it can make up for the huge cost of asynchronicity is another question (each delay breaks your flow, requiring you to cache-out, cache-in...)

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#254

Post by jdhzzz »

rethab wrote: post #29

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office. By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating you…

I still have PTSD from pre-COVID days when I would be working at in my cubicle and have someone "drive-by" with a quick question and plop their laptop on my desk.

"Can I ask you a question?" (Ugh) "Sure."

It might only take five minutes. Then I'd reconnect to _my_ work. That and getting over my, admittedly emotional, irritation at the interruption would take another 5 minutes.

I really liked being able to delay those folks to when it was convenient for _me_ while working from home.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#255

Post by jrs235 »

ath3nd wrote: post #237
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I definitely agree with that, and I have been on both sides of the coin, with a little team doing a lot of projects very quickly and also a corporation job where things move very slowly. Also having done so many side projects. The unfortunate usual thing is though that the jobs that pay a lot usually involve a lot of people. Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not pr…

> Because when a small group of very productive programmers start out, their business is not proven yet, but when it actually is proven and will start to make a lot of money What if we stop at making a lot of money in a proven business, and don't hire more unless absolutely necessary? Keep the team small and lean, retain the talented people who brought you here via profit sharing, and just...relax? I am surprised tha…

Because few are able and willing to NOT take outside money (get investors). Investors want to invest in a cancer not somebody's life-style business.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#256

Post by akoboldfrying »

GoToRO wrote: post #224
akoboldfrying wrote: post #79

I sympathise with some of this, but the tone is unbearable. >Don't worry, I'm not mad at you. Those are common mistakes that people make Calling a common and natural communication style that is not your preferred communication style objectively a "mistake". Charming. >Maybe you work in an environment where productivity is low, so everyone has time to jump on a quick call or chat with you any time you ask. "But I don'…

This is the classic "I don't have any counterarguments so I'll complain about something fuzzy, like the tone" comment.

If OP's goal is to actually change people's behaviour, tone is very important. If their goal is just to vent, it doesn't matter.

I've assumed the former.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#257

Post by pbrum »

rethab wrote: post #29

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office. By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating you…

The water cooler thing is a myth. I've spent my fair share of time in tech company offices and have never seen, nor cannot think of, anything worthwhile coming out of those encounters. Like other posters said, a shared meal with colleagues is a different story, though it will typically increase social connections rather than generate new productive/business outcomes

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#259

Post by makeitdouble »

LunaSea wrote: post #124
refurb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've never been in an office and had a productive, random interaction with a coworker? Like, never? I've had it happen on a regular basis. I see someone and suddenly remember to tell them "oh, I did some work on that long ago, I'll share it with you" or you overhear a conversation about a topic you didn't know they were looking at?

> You've never been in an office and had a productive, random interaction with a coworker? I absolutely did have these interactions but simply not online.

I think the biggest change with online communication is moving these random encounters into peering into what other teams are doing, or what they're discussing.

For instance we had someone from a completely unrelated team bump into a project thread discussion our firewall rules, and coming up with the proposed changes he was working on and wanting to brainstorm something that could work beyond his team.

You'd need an incredible level of luck to bump into that precise discussion at a water cooler, and it would require a super broad call to get people to gather on that subject the "normal" way. But having most communication in Slack, indexed and accessible cross-team gives incredible opportunities for these kind of interactions that would be just impossible on the previous office culture.

Re: No "Hello", No "Quick Call", and No Meetings Without an Agenda

#260

Post by makeitdouble »

Gravityloss wrote: post #73
rethab wrote: post #29

We cannot forget that we also loose something with working remotely (say more than 75% of the time) and that is the occasional bumping into each other at the water cooler or in the morning when coming in. These are situations you can artificially create by scheduling calls to socialize etc, but that is still not comparable with being in an actual office. By categorically saying no to quick calls, you're isolating you…

I notice I often breathe deeply after a telecon. As if I was holding my breath during it. Even if the telecon was quite laid back. It doesn't happen in water cooler talks. Have there been studies about what causes this, or even how to alleviate?

As sister comments are pointing out, it's a pretty common thing ("zoom fatigue")

Personally the best improvement was closing the camera feed, and that has been my team's experience as well.

There will be extremely few meetings (mainly HR and meetings with external vendors) where we set the camera, and even for those you can do the opening and presentation with camera on, and just shut it after that for the meat of the discussion.

The biggest part is we're presenting documents and slides either way, so seeing the person's face somewhere just doesn't help. In particular we want to check the meeting transcript realtime to be sure it matches what we're talking about. Overall I've seen no downsides doing it since the pandemic, and don't see going back to camera on meetings by default.

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