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Comment by Bluepacsky | Hacker News Reader

I like the general idea of having less meetings. I try to cut time down for meetings I am responsible for. However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not). 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes out of sixty minutes. But it feels that often written content ahead of time (such as the amazon approach) would alleviate that need. Do you have any advise on how to deal with inefficient meeting culture by others?

How do you use anonymous feedback? We do not have any tools in place for this but I do like the idea.

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> However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not).

We dealt with this in the zoom era by having some people present but not paying attention. They would join the meeting but then turn the sound off and do their own thing. If we needed their input on something, then we would ping them on slack and they would come in and provide their input. In GCal, marking people as "optionally" attending meant that they were free to not pay attention.

> 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes out of sixty minutes.

We made a rule that every meeting had to have an agenda list posted to slack before the meeting and a summary posted to slack after the meeting. The meeting convener was responsible for making sure this happened but could delegate this responsibility to someone else. Often, this was a good onboarding task for new members joining the team.

I quite like this and I feel like you could go one better and have optional people be "on call" during the meeting i.e. they should be available to ring in if needed.

We tried that initially and there was just a bit too much friction involved in them finding the zoom link and then joining and then getting their mic connected and everything. It was easier to just have them join the meeting in the beginning and be muted so it was ~5s for them to hop into a convo.

deal with inefficient meeting culture

Use an auto-transcription service. If presence is required, try to get a real time system going and flag keywords. That way you can alternate task your way to the important bits without dedicated mental bandwidth. The nice thing about this is you just need the system audio feed, muted, as the input which by definition works with all conferencing platforms.

can you provide some specific recommendations here?

https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

One thing businesses should be aware of here, if they go for this, is the legal risk that such transcripts end up being disclosed in a legal discovery process. Most businesses wouldn't want every word that's said in a meeting to be recorded and stored "forever" (which it likely is, if you use a third party cloud based tool).

Also, if you do go for an external tool, there's now someone outside your organisation with a recording and transcript of every meeting you've used this for... That's a potential goldmine - not the kind of company you want you see acquired or merging in the future.

Maybe people's expectations will change due to so many online meetings, but under normal circumstances, I can't imagine many legal teams would want the risk of a third party transcription tool listening in.

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