If you havent already done so, go and change your entire organizations default meeting length to 30 minutes. Force people to justify why they need an hour. Still not sure why it isnt the default.
People get to be human and do things like use the restroom, get a drink, or just take a breath in between meetings without being flustered and apologizing for being late.
I've only been to one company that had a sane meeting culture. Along with every meeting invitation there were attached documents that you were expected to read. You were expected to have notes and comments ready. The meetings mostly were not supposed to be a time where you worked vague things out.
Specifics are already easy to discuss async.
Just sharing my POV. You do you. :)
“An academic quarter (localized into various languages in the countries where it is practiced[a]) is the quarter-hour (15 minute) discrepancy between the defined start time for a lecture or lesson ("per schema") and the actual starting time, at some universities in Europe including Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the United States.”
Complete disrespect for him, absolutely the norm for me :D He learned to be less angry and I learned to be less "late"
However, while meetings were sometimes explicitly scheduled for a quarter past, if your thesis supervisor schedules a meeting at, e.g., 9 AM, then be sure not to show up at 9:15. :)
It works really well, except for non-classes no one is ever sure if you were told UofT-time or normal-time. For example if you agree to meet with a prof or ta outside of class..
I think I would have preferred if they just always scheduled things at "xx:10 to yy:00" instead of having the ":10" as implicit.
My personal observation is the timing matters less than the number of participants. More people usually equals less insights and more wasted time. One rule could be "if you can't emerge with an action item you shouldn't be here." But I'm not sure if that's practical as an organization grows and social/political relationships matter more.
A lot of these organizations put status updates as meetings though, which is never necessary. There are a lot of better ways to send status updates.
Force people to justify why they need a meeting as well, have an agenda, keep a tight schedule, don't let people change the agenda or rant on. One thing I found in the scrum style meetings is that people love to be on the soapbox for their allotted time.
* a firm that was demanding devs return to office already in January pre-vaccine, justifying it by paying for Ubers & doing PCR testing in office
* a firm which in its job-spec explicitly listing that "8a-6p are standard hours" and "plus other hours as required for role / due to support / meetings out of region / some flexibility required"
what a shitshow tech can be
So why would that be a "bad word around these parts" ?
Unions gave us the weekend, can’t be all bad.
Some revolving list of "other team __" being slow/unreliable/hard to manage/etc..
The same 1 or 2 senior devs is tasked with taking away some discussion points to have with them.
Rinse&repeat.
The meetings would only take a few minutes with Kanban, assuming the backlog stayed sorted. I just asked where the new tickets had to go in the current sorted list.
These meetings would be much faster if project managers didn't clog the backlog with stream-of-consciousness tickets.
However I was never an Agile guy. I trimmed the process heavily, and took up most of the backlog maintenance so that others could work.
Our product manager sits in on the meetings such that he can says yes/no when questioned on tickets, but for all I know could be watching soap operas given his level of engagement.
So the best approach would probably be to schedule 30min meetings that are always followed by 30min free time; so that everyone knows there is an urgency to be brief, but it's not the end of the world if you overrun 10mins. Otherwise you end up with back-to-back meetings and "I have to go, sorry", even if we're not actually done, or the 1h snoozefests.
I think there is space for some software here, that could automatically tweak one's calendar to "block out" post-meeting time by a predetermined amount in Outlook (yes, don't try to pry people out of Outlook, you're not going to win).
> meetings that are always followed by 30min free time
It seems better to have no free time between meetings. That way everybody is much more motivated to keep them to the allotted time. 30 min is much too short an interval to do serious technical work.