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How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

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Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#51

Post by anotheryou »

AnthonBerg wrote: post #50
anotheryou wrote: post #39

purely technical, but lower latency (even at the cost of crackles), make everyone have a good mic, emulated spacial audio. I think these things would help so so much. I wonder if there is any research on the impact of these.

Emphatically agreed. I’m sure there are some research results on how high-quality audio improves meetings – or conversely, how degraded audio degrades communications. Those research results might not be trivially easy to find however. And I’m sure there’s been less of this kind of research than we’d like. However! I’m fairly sure that a pretty convincing picture can be assembled through looking at things from differe…

one interesting part to me is: I don't think we need 3D VR. Movies, even on a small screen can be totally immersive.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#52

Post by RHSeeger »

arp242 wrote: post #34
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, this may sound nuts but I think the only issue with your proposal is that it doesn’t address the reason that this doesn’t happen. Our colleagues do not or do not want to read business communications for the purpose of comprehension for the content of their own work or communication with their colleagues. I genuinely propose a three strike policy where professional employees are to be fired after three occasions…

People not reading emails hasn't really been a problem pretty much anywhere I worked for the last 10 years or more. People not writing them has been a problem though. Maybe this was caused by people not reading them, but I've always suspected that a lot of people just don't like writing, and/or aren't very good at it. So it's easier for them to do an in-person meeting. And when no or very few emails get sent, no on r…

> Maybe this was caused by people not reading them, but I've always suspected that a lot of people just don't like writing, and/or aren't very good at it.

Writing an email tends is harder than having a meeting, because you (generally) need to understand the problem to talk about it. This is true of both providing information about the problem and for asking questions about it. Part of writing about something is taking the time to understand it.

It can easily take me 20-30 minutes to write an email about something. But, especially in the case of asking for more information about something, it _also_ results in me having a clearer understanding of the topic; because I needed to identify what questions to ask. However, me spending 30 minutes on writing that email means

- I understand the problem better (as noted), AND

- Multiple _other_ people don't spend 15 minutes in a meeting while I solidify my understanding enough to ask the right questions. And that saves a lot more time overall.

That being said, sometimes meetings are the right answer, because there's a gap somewhere and people just don't know what questions to ask; they need to get together and just talk about it.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#53

Post by RHSeeger »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #13
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, this may sound nuts but I think the only issue with your proposal is that it doesn’t address the reason that this doesn’t happen. Our colleagues do not or do not want to read business communications for the purpose of comprehension for the content of their own work or communication with their colleagues. I genuinely propose a three strike policy where professional employees are to be fired after three occasions…

Too much email spam from the company, including fake phishing attempts, to take my inbox seriously. It's a noisy channel. Email is also slow. Instant messaging is where it's at, but most people's reading comprehension and writing are not at the level where that's the only viable medium.

Depends entirely on the context. There are plenty of cases where email, _especially_ when it comes to taking the time to sort out your thoughts and then format them nicely, is better than instance messaging.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#54

Post by sriram_malhar »

xingped wrote: post #46
sriram_malhar wrote: post #45

Fully agree with the article's focus on proper meeting discipline. This can be coupled with Edward Tufte's suggestions on how to present at a meeting. To summarize, he says that there is no point sending a presentation in advance .. most will not read it anyway. Instead of a presentation, write about 5-6 six pages of prose and hand them out at the beginning of the meeting. Every one will scan the document in their ow…

Haha, you say that, but from years of personal experience with this meeting style, what really happens is you end up getting a lot of questions which are clearly answered further up/down in the document or questions which are completely pointless or nonsensical to ask but people like to just be heard and make themselves look good for having something to say.

I hear you, which is where one needs a no-nonsense moderator who will say “that has been answered on page 1”, and who has the authority to shut down the high caucus noisy people

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#55

Post by gumby »

We have a system that works well for our small founding team.

Normally I am pretty hardcore that meetings need an agenda (can be loose) and intended outcome when the meeting invitation is sent out, or else I don’t attend.

BUT our small founding team has an exception: we have a daily, morning, remote, agendaless meeting. It’s the opposite of a standup: you can talk about anything. Sometimes it’s things that have fallen through the cracks; I can’t help doing standupy things myself (“this is what I’m doing today in 20 seconds” but that’s just me;) we also hear that so and so’s daughter just got engaged, someone else will be busy coz their spouse will be having a procedure today and they want to drop them off/get them from the hospital, etc. it’s to provide the “water cooler” experience of in the office. Important things get decided too. And we skip sometimes, perhaps one day every other week, since it’s like a bus and will come around tomorrow again.

We do overlap in person at times in the lab but they aren’t awkward because we all have a common social context.

It won’t scale as we grow, unfortunately.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#56

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

tired-turtle wrote: post #40
j16sdiz wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... (a) covid and (2) one ... > ... because we (a) ... and (2) actually Why are you (consistently) follow "(a)" with "(2)"? Is this an AI thing?

I suspect to emphasize enumeration so readers don’t incorrectly parse the sentence. But the text would be even clearer had these speech patterns been omitted altogether.

I'm way more irked by (2) following (a). It's (a), (b), (c), or (1), (2), (3), or (а), (б), (в), but for chrissake, don't mix the styles.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#57

Post by el_duderino_ »

peterbozso wrote: post #44

Answering the title: like we do at GitLab. https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-rem...

Is working with GitLab as nice as it sounds? Every time I read the employee documentation I get the feeling working there would be a great experience.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#58

Post by rurp »

wvenable wrote: post #11

In our organization, remote meetings don't suck. It more or less just happened organically because we are a fairly flat organization but in a traditional industry. Mostly no cameras. I don't even own a webcam. A meeting is called for a reason (even if it's recurring). We have no "this is the morning meeting" kind of meetings. There a single person in charge of the meeting. This is most often the person who wants to g…

> Mostly no cameras.

It's interesting to hear this from others. Years ago I would have expected that camera-on meetings would be more productive on average, but my own experience is the opposite. I have only worked at a few remote companies but the places where cameras mostly weren't used had far far less wasted meeting time.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#59

Post by r00fus »

bruce511 wrote: post #36
wvenable wrote: post #11

In our organization, remote meetings don't suck. It more or less just happened organically because we are a fairly flat organization but in a traditional industry. Mostly no cameras. I don't even own a webcam. A meeting is called for a reason (even if it's recurring). We have no "this is the morning meeting" kind of meetings. There a single person in charge of the meeting. This is most often the person who wants to g…

Typically I leave my camera off during meetings. (Well, the boring ones anyway.) Which means I just keep on working during the meeting listening with half an ear. This is especially applicable to reoccurring meetings where the manager is talking to the team, getting progress reports, working through the jira list and so on. This actually makes for a really productive meeting. I can fill the dead time with admin tasks…

> One tip I noticed, if Roger should comment on what I'm about to say then say "hey roger" at the start of the piece not " what do you think roger" at the end. :)

I do this without thinking. I even add some fluff or delay between the "hey roger" so that Roger has time to context-switch before I ask the question because you know everyone is multitasking during these meetings.

Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)

#60

Post by soneca »

gumby wrote: post #55

We have a system that works well for our small founding team. Normally I am pretty hardcore that meetings need an agenda (can be loose) and intended outcome when the meeting invitation is sent out , or else I don’t attend. BUT our small founding team has an exception: we have a daily, morning, remote, agendaless meeting. It’s the opposite of a standup: you can talk about anything. Sometimes it’s things that have fall…

We have that habit in the small company I work too, and it’s great. It does not scale indeed, and it only works if, outside of those, you only have very few meetings, but I enjoy having this more humane and organic connection with my coworkers
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