Culture is hard. The effort that executives and leaders in originations with good culture exert to maintain it is often underestimated.
How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
81–90 of 113 posts
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#82Remote meetings and meetings in general are good when there is an outcome for the meeting, when there are only the people that NEED to be in the meeting, the meeting is short enough to create outcomes without blabbering on and the timeframe is adhered to.
I cannot stand it when a 15 minute stand up, becomes a 30+ minute discussion that rolls into the next one and the next one.
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#83Answering 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.
Doesn’t Gitlab blatantly discriminate in salaries?
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#84In 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.
I definitely find camera-on meetings have people pay more attention. Whether that is more productive or not depends on your definition of productive.
The the “camera off lets me do other work”-theory that people in this thread adhere to says the meeting itself is unproductive and the less involved participants are the more chance they have of being productive.
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#85Fully 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 s…
Tufte makes a decent case for why it should be prose. But then, as an academic, it comes easy to him.
As you say, sufficiently self-descriptive bullet points should communicate equally well.
I find that whenever I go to that level of detail, I end up mentally with a prose narration at the leaf level, so I transfer that to the doc. This fills in some important connectives, such as "finally", "on the other hand" and asides such as "this is a minor point that should not affect the final outcome". This is helpful for people who may not have you around to explain. I also tweak that document after the meeting to fill in answers to questions that were asked.
Equally, for an important meeting, it is not enough to be an agenda. The content is important. The audience for the presentation should be people who are not in the meeting, but could have been (people on vacation, people promoted to the appropriate level, future hires).
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I definitely find camera-on meetings have people pay more attention. Whether that is more productive or not depends on your definition of productive. The the “camera off lets me do other work”-theory that people in this thread adhere to says the meeting itself is unproductive and the less involved participants are the more chance they have of being productive.
Amazon is very much a camera-on kind of company. What I noticed is that everyone turns on their camera, then most people stare dead-eyed at the camera, not doing anything useful, but also making sure they don’t move or let their eyes drift from looking at the camera. And as soon as they join, they mute themselves or are automatically muted.
Only when they are called on do they then respond, and it’s usually a pretty perfunctory response. I mean, they have been listening and not doing anything else while listening, because they’ve been so focused on the fact that they are on-camera 100% of the time and they don’t ever want to be seen to be doing anything “wrong” during that time.
I do remember some folks had their camera aimed at them from the side (presumably from the laptop camera, while they’re using one of the external monitors as their main monitor), and they would sometimes be doing things while not looking at the camera. But they would quickly come back and respond, if someone called out their name.
In contrast, other employers have had a no camera policy, and that can get a bit weird to explain to external parties who are used to being on-camera 100% of the time. So, I’ve always tried to help explain that to the external folks.
For no-camera companies, it seems to me that those people are usually more engaged with actually listening to the conversation and responding in real time during the meeting, as opposed to waiting until their name is called. They’re also less likely to automatically mute themselves when they join the meeting, but also less likely to need to mute themselves when they join.
And the no-camera companies seem to be well aware of how much the meeting is costing in terms of how people are there and how long they’re all on the call, and then ending it early if they can.
It’s a big culture shift to go from one type of company to the other type.
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#87It 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?
That’s funny, because I didn’t even notice it.
In my own writing, I usually try to be very consistent, unless I am intentionally trying to make a joke or keep things light. And in those cases, I am very deliberate in my use of mixing the styles.
But in reading someone else do this, I didn’t even notice.
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#88> 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
This is one of the few things I actually liked about the way Amazon did meetings. The standard was to distribute the document first, or in the event that couldn’t be done, to provide a link to the document at the very beginning of the meeting.
You’d spend the first part of the meeting with everyone reading the document (and maybe commenting on it, if you gave them the link), and then once everyone had read the document, you could start discussing it. They made heavy use of “Quip” as a shared document writing/commenting system for anything that was still being worked on, although official documents would need to be in Microsoft Word format.
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#89Answering 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.
If you can be a manager of one [1], then absolutely, yes. If not, then I can imagine it being really frustrating a lot of times.
Based on my past work experience, working at GitLab is more similar to being a freelancer in terms of freedom and flexibility - with all the benefits of being an employee (professional community, job security, etc.) too.
[1]: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/#managers-of...
Re: How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn’t Gitlab blatantly discriminate in salaries?
I don't really know what you mean by that. Yes, the salaries are tied to locations [1]. But I get compensated well above the average compared to doing the same job at other companies (including international ones) in my country (Austria).
[1]: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensat...