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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)

#71

Post by spencerchubb »

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…

To my knowledge, the 6-pager was popularized by Bezos. It requires the document to be very well written, or else the 6-pager will be wasting the readers' time. It also requires strong reading comprehension, which frankly, most employees do not. It works well for Amazon execs because they are all sharp

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

#72

Post by j45 »

Better meeting skills in person help make remote meetings better.

Lots of great tips in the comments, for me it's making sure meetings don't become a timepass.

Meeting cadence whtn the meetings are new is important. Often eaiser to have a regular meeting and a mini check in the frist while until things are going.

Ongoing Cadence is important, too often or too little time to get things done can be hindrance.

Days of week can make a difference too. Talk Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon to leave time for people to start dealing with their week, and also on Thursdays to have enough time to finish something for Friday.

The later in the week a meeting is, the less that can be done about it that week and it can perpetually push into the next week.

Group note taking and agenda - there are neat meeting management apps out there that make things more interactive like carrying forward agenda items automatically, sending out the agenda for you in advance, etc.

Note taking - This has become easier with AI, but having someone still send them out is great. Depending on whether management wants, having an out line of people's tasks documented to them can make it easier, but everyone should be taking notes to not get dependent on this. If this can be available often meetings can be shorter.

Agendas and concise materials before meeting- can help people catch up and prepare to help make sure the meeting is about decisions and discussions in support of a discussion, and not discussion for the sake of doing the work on the meeting itself.

Juniors first - one for the best things Ive ever seen is having juniors offer their input and thoughts first, which can be followed up outside the meeting with ongoing mentorship with seniors. it can be as simple as this is what I have learned to understand about this, and the rest of the team learns that they can rely on this person more.

From a tech side, something novel and fresh every so often can help. Learn to use Zoom/Teams/Mmmhmm and it keeps it visually interesting and easy to pass around updates.

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

#73

Post by bowsamic »

j16sdiz wrote: post #38
dhosek wrote: post #30

It seems to me that the problem isn’t that remote meetings suck but that meetings suck. My writing group meets remotely because (a) covid and (2) one of the members moved to Ohio from Chicago. We manage not to have the issues about people interrupting etc., likely because we (a) care about what we’re doing and (2) actually that caring about what we’re doing really covers it. We do have structure in that we’re worksho…

> ... (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 think it’s a quirky thing

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

#74

Post by bravetraveler »

agentultra wrote: post #22

> if the goal is instead to deliver info to the attendees, your meeting should be an email If we just stuck to this rule I would have hours of more time to do actual work. So many “meetings,” are listening to folks um-and-ah their way through their slides. They read the exact text they wrote. Slowly. It’s painful. Just send an email. If this happens in recurring meetings, make an email digest.

As I grow older, and perhaps comfortable in my skin/being fired/whatever, I will actually just ask for the document to be shared before leaving the meeting in these cases

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

#76

Post by notnaut »

rurp wrote: post #58
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.

David Foster Wallace was clever in his forethought here, though the reasons video calls have largely fallen out of favor in the real world may be different.

“Within like 16 months or 5 sales quarters, the tumescent demand curve collapsed like a kicked tent, so that by the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, fewer than 10 percent of all private telephone communications utilized any video image fiber data transfers … the average US phone user deciding that s/he actually preferred the retrograde old low-tech Bell-era voice-only phone interface after all. … Audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her ... video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable.”

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

#78

Post by throwaway4aday »

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…

This is really just wasting 20 minutes, it's much better to have a clear agenda which is basically in the form of bullet point notes that most people would make outlining the important topics and questions. Then just go through the agenda providing a brief elaboration on each topic and take questions, get agreement, write down the conclusion and move on. If the meeting is purely informational then in most cases you shouldn't even have a meeting.

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

#79

Post by deathanatos »

The "caucus" format as the reason that remote meeting suck doesn't make much sense in the context of our thesis of "remote meetings" suck, since it's not unique to remote meetings. If we go with that conclusion, IRL meetings should suck, too, and the remote-ness is inconsequential.

Though … IMO, that fits: remote meetings and IRL meetings suck equally to me, and the "caucus" reasoning seems to jive with my experience.

Good luck fixing it, though; the ruling class of management is the ones with the authority to implement moderation, and AFAICT management as a profession is not convinced that meetings are bad. (Or at the very best, they're only convinced that everyone else's meetings are bad.)

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

#80

Post by andrei_says_ »

rurp wrote: post #58
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.

This is interesting - Could you expand on the relationship between cameras and wasted time?

What qualifies as wasted time and how are cameras a contributing factor?

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