Meetings: Where Work Goes to Die
codinghorror.com
codinghorror.com
One additional point I would add is that there really should be someone in the role of Chair (e.g if there are more then 3/4 people taking part). The Chair's only job is to make sure things stick to time and the important points get covered. It doesn't have to be the 'boss', even though people expect it to be.
I used to chair lots of meetings and while my style used to come across as a bit militant, after a few sessions people could be assured of the following. (1) Timing was followed (i.e start and end on time). (2) If someone was specifically asked to be there, it was because their input was needed. (3) There was always an agenda and we'd stick to it.
Although I felt like a bully at first, people did seem to appreciate this style after a while. Folks would arrive (on time), discuss/decide stuff quickly and then get on with their lives.
Meetings are just something else you have to learn about if you want to do them well.
Evidence that it was valued is that people started behaving differently, meetings ran efficiently and some folks would occasionally thank me.
7. No cell phones or laptops. People must focus on the task at hand and nothing else.
8. Lock the door at the start time and don't unlock it for anyone. People will soon learn to show up on time.
9. Designate a referee to say "One at a time," "Take that off-line," or "So what?" Amazing how well kindergarten rules still work.
10. Kill anyone who says any of these words or phrases: scope, mission, best practices, teaching moment, outside the box, domain, tangent, or <x> is the new <y>.
We have a culture where it was acceptable for me to bang a gavel and tell people who were rambling or cross-talking to "SHUT THE FUCK UP." Simple and effective.
Toward the end of my tenure meetings where we interviewed 10 new members, reviewed an officer, added several new house policies, and allowed community announcements took 45 minutes.
So, my point is, it's important for everyone on the team to agree to rather firm terms. Nobody will be mad about this and people do start watching how they speak. Hell, I'm rambling too much right now. "SHUT THE ...
Won't work if you have a lot of adepts of standing desks, though.
If the guy who _called_ the meeting isn't doing this, it's time to leave.
Also when should the referee say 'so what'? Whenever somebody complains? Because in a company which needs these rules, that is the only thing that right will be used for.
Unless it was a meeting that you wanted, or needed, to be there for!
Worked really well at the last place I was at, people made damn sure they got there on time and if not that someone knowledgeable took their place.
Great one. I will never forget the embarrassment endured when I showed up 2 minutes late for my (very first) senior high-school business class and the teacher had locked me out of the room.
Needless to say I was never late for that class the rest of the year.
In college I would find this more acceptable, the professor can set any classroom rules he wants regarding attendance.
In the workplace, a real, office-style workplace, I would hope the person who locked the door would be quickly reprimanded. Why did you invite the person (and take their precious time) if you obviously don't want them there?
I don't know, why couldn't they have made the effort to show up on time?
There's a reason classes in school and college have a 10-15 minute "passing time" built in.
It's not like you miss much on the first day of class, either.
If I had a good reason, like if I yelled "my mother died" through the glass, I'm sure she would have let me in. But I didn't.
6 says there should be no chairs and people will learn to focus but 9 says people are kids and need kindergarten rules.
FWIW I think 9 defines the role of the chair, anyway.
to sit on. At least in the context of rule #6.
The fact about meetings is that they are often nothing but battle grounds for various people to show how good they are.
By designating a devils advocate up front you make sure that people spend their time fighting him/her and thus you avoid having too many "critical thinkers" who only look for flaws.
Also, though I do appreciate the need for people to show up on time, shit happens. And the more people there are, the more likely it is for shit to happen (if everyone in a 20 person daily meeting had one bad day per month, you'd have on average one late person per meeting). It gets even more awkward when someone you lock out is needed in order for the meeting to move forward.
I've been to many meetings where I am the only person without a laptop. Most people are zoning out on email, which circularly reinforces that meetings are a waste of time so you better bring your laptop so you can at least catch up on your email. ;)
8: If you lock the door when I'm in the room, I'm leaving the room.
Maybe it would work for a small number of people, but otherwise it's just harmful. (I skip the issue of having that many meetings though - this is not something you can always control)
- If the meeting involves creatives (coders, designers, graphics, etc), shove them all towards one day of the week, or one time of the day.
One of my pet peeves about my last job was that PMs and managers felt free to book meetings at any damn time of the day. If I have a half-hour gap between meeting A and meeting B, I won't get anything done. It got so bad in "crunch time" (when everyone wanted updates on everything) that work practically stopped. My day was 4 hours of meetings interspersed with complete and utterly wasted time.
Creatives need significant stretches of time to actually get anything done. Book your meetings around these.
Every meeting should have a clearly defined mission statement ... I hesitate to recommend having an "agenda" and "agenda items" because the word agenda implies a giant, tedious bulleted list of things to cover.
Yet an agenda is the best tool for controlling meetings if the chair is any good. It says "this is what we will discuss and decide and only this". A meeting should not be a free-form discussion -- leave that for chance encounters in the office kitchen. It's a transactional form of communication, a tool to make efficiently make collective decisions.
Do your homework before the meeting.
Which is why agenda are circulated -- and even more because:
Make it optional.
Yes! And as Tom DeMarco points out in (I believe) The Deadline, meetings which don't stick to the agenda lead inevitably to everyone having to come to every single meeting just in case something gets decided. If the agenda is trustworthy, people will stay away who should stay away; only interested parties -- who will do the homework because it's relevant to them -- will turn up.
Summarize to-dos at the end of the meeting.
These are called "minutes". Properly written minutes are very useful and they don't have to be in legalese. The University Computer Club at the University of Western Australia, where I studied, have excellent minutes[1], written with a sense of humour.
Before I came to my senses, I used to be involved in student politics. And if that unpleasant experience taught me anything, it was the power of meeting mechanics. A well-run meeting is an extremely useful institution. Get in, discuss, decide, get out. Bam. No ambiguity, nothing left hanging.
As a chair there is one rule that counts: don't let the meeting get side-tracked. Stick to the agenda, work it. People quickly learn that they need to get their stuff onto the agenda in advance and the whole process begins to work better. Discussions become more focused, decisions can be made quickly and efficiently.
Those who are interested might like to join an organisation like Toastmasters or the Penguin Club to hone their skills, or get involved in committee work, or join a union, incorporated club or political branch. The skills of running an effective meeting are very useful. I applied them during my capstone unit at uni; my team delivered 92% of agreed functionality on-time with no significant defects. And part of that was running tight meetings.
I agree with you that well run meetings are crucial, and that traditional formats can be excellent. I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.
1. Metadata -- who was there, start time, end time.
2. What was discussed. Regular reports are typical.
3. What decisions were made.
4. Who will carry out which decisions.
It's common to see 3&4 in one of two formats:
1. Interpolated. "Motion: Jack to install new monitoring package. Moved Jill, Seconded Wei Li. Passed."
2. Appended. A list at the bottom of "action items". The UCC minutes I linked above take this approach, which has the readability advantage.
I offer gentle caution about bureaucracy - some people are great at setting agenda and forming committees and voting on chairs and so on, but lousy at actually getting any work done.
Yes, absolutely. I saw meetings abused during my student politics days. Some really dramatic stuff.
Also, I got in the habit of putting a table of actions right at the front of the minutes (after the preamble of time/date/attendees etc). It was the first thing people would see on opening the doc.
PDF: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.pdf
DOC: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/486678/ExampleMinutes_2012-02-14.doc
Edit: I once toyed with the idea of trying to write an iPad app that can automagically structure a set of minutes for you. It would have been a way for me to learn iOS and do something useful for myself at the time.
I toyed with a similar idea for an application, but this was about a decade ago when my (most excellent) secretary grumbled about my nitpicking.
It is such a valuable experience because eventually you have to work with people who mess with meetings for a living (politicians, bureaucrats, middle managers in large firms, and the list goes on). Knowing their tricks puts you one step ahead.
I saw this a lot of times and I still don't get it. I actually don't want chance encounters in the office kitchen. I don't use the office kitchen, and I don't want communication to be a matter of chance. I don't want to have to "hang around" when it comes to work.
I want to hear the "btw I'm also working on this pb for XXX in parallel" during the meeting if it should have any effect on my work. Even if it's not on the agenda. And I don't want a second meeting afterwards just to discuss this point. I don't want 10 meetings in a days with ultra tight agendas if all of it can be freely discussed in one.
I want one meeting with a clear theme (like "how's the project going"), but where you say anything you want, and we are all done with meetings for the day.
But if they're not an agenda item they shouldn't be discussed because it's not that meeting.
The point is to allow people to make their own decision on whether they attend by giving them useful information on what will be discussed.
Just because that's what you want to do, doesn't mean that's what some particular meeting you happen to be in should be about.
Of course if nobody cares about some tangent point, it should be stopped on the spot. If a discussion appears while some of the stakeholders are missing, it might be postponed as well, but if it's not the case there's no reason no to go on and discuss it, just because it's not on the agenda.
If you've got 10 people in the meeting and 6 people start discussing something, you've got 4 people who are having their time wasted and were given no choice in the matter.
It's the same pattern as when you need to be in a meeting about a specific point, but not attend all the other points. You ask to have the stuff you care about come first and you can leave it after. If some unexpected things needs your input, you'll be called in anyway.
You don't have to schedule an entirely different meeting room to talk about it - more often than not at my work, the people who want to discuss the unexpected point just stay after the original meeting has ended to discuss it.
To everyone who was there for the agenda, the meeting is effectively over - for the others, you could say the meeting continues on with the unexpected topic.
The important part is that everyone meets for as short as is needed - they don't have to keep running in and out of meetings to see if things are relevant, or stay and listen to things that don't matter to them.
But this is exactly how it's supposed to work. It's efficient to table side discussions that don't apply to everyone. Otherwise, you're just wasting a subset of the participants' time.
A proper agenda should contain everything that absolutely needs to be talked about at that time. That is the focus of the meeting. If additional discussions are spawned that aren't covered by it, they should be taken offline, either with an additional meeting, or with an informal discussion after.
I agree in this kind of situation, unexpected items are of limited scope, shouldn't affect the meeting agenda, and can be dealt at other time.
Now, this would be more the exception than the rule, at least in my experience. And if you can reach this point in your organization, I think you can get rid of the meeting altogether, and just validate the different points by mail or group chat.
Agreed, though if people in your office have grown accustomed to that style of meeting, then you'll need to do a lot of conditioning -- and keep a pretty short leash on things -- until they're used to a more structured agenda. Eventually, though, they'll realize just how much time and energy they save with short, focused meetings.
Let's say that you're chairing a meeting, and it's going off-track in a non-productive direction. I've found that a pretty effective cure for meeting chatter and tangential discussion is raising the specter of wasted time. This could be as simple as: "Guys, we have a lot to cover, and I want us to get out of here on time."
A statement like that does two things. First, it places the burden on the side-trackers to get back on topic by making them look like the bad guys (and not you, who might otherwise be seen as too rigid). Second, it reminds everybody that the meeting isn't happening in a magical bubble of parallel spacetime. It's ticking away very real minutes from the workday -- minutes that nobody's getting back at the end of the meeting. (For some reason, people seem to lose conscious track of time in meetings, and later wonder where the day went).
Finally, we should note that time-wasting meetings usually stem from the behavior of the meeting chair. If you demonstrate that you're willing to cave on the agenda -- or that your agenda is improperly long, vague, scattershot, improperly socialized beforehand, etc. -- then you're going to lose the room. Likewise, if you kick off your meeting with idle chatter, you're going to get idle chatter in return. (Don't open with "So, did you guys do anything fun this weekend?" and then expect anything but a 20-minute digression). It may seem unnatural to start the meeting right on topic, absent the social lubrication of small talk. But a meeting isn't the time or place for small talk, as you've pointed out.
You approve the minutes of the previous meeting, you transact old business, you open for new business, you address the chair when you want to speak (and stand so everyone knows who has the floor), you have a time limit for speaking (for contentious issues), and then you vote.
Anything that is unclear gets tabled until next meeting when someone proposes something thats actually thought out enough to have someone to 2nd it.
The ethos of standing meetings is pretty good, nobody can get comfortable and decisions are made quickly. To this end meetings ARE useful in some situations, topic for discussion should be circulated prior and agreement made in the meeting. As you don't want to fall into the trap of long email threads between co-workers which could be solved with a few minutes of discussion.
Every time I need to communicate something, I stop and ask myself, what level of interruption does my message warrant? An email? IM? A meeting? It's very rare that it will save time to bypass email and IM for a meeting. Meetings because project managers want to spend less time in email and IM is unacceptable.
Obviously unfocused and overly general meetings are not good, but for reasonable ones, I find taking the headphones off and going to speak/listen to some human beings for a while to be rejuvenating.
I figure it comes down to extroverts (recharged by interacting with others) vs introverts (drained by interacting with others).
I thought my word choice might bring up the intro/extro-vert thing, but I think someone needs to be a pretty extreme case to be flustered by a (reasonable length) meeting with people they already know and hopefully like. I don't really buy it.
1. I don't go to a meeting that doesn't have an agenda.
2. After I get the agenda, I try and work out what I can over email and phone, if possible.
3. If I can't get out of the meeting following step two, I let the meeting organizer know I'm available for 45 minutes at the maximum.
4. I leave at 45 minutes regardless if the meeting is done or not.
These principles have served me well.
It's not just where work goes to die, it's also a great way to drive individuals out of a company who just want to do good work. Meetings were exactly why we were missing deadlines and were forced to deliver assets that were lower quality because we didn't have the time (thanks to meetings) to do anything right. Meeting-itis is like dropping a nuclear bomb on the morale of some of your team members.
Moreover, I'm convinced the reason why projects might devolve into meeting-itis is because none of the attendees can agree on A) what is to be done B) or how to do it. In which, since no one's yet done the legwork to get all that sorted out, there should be no meetings until said A and B have been established and taken care of.
there is no agenda, there is no reason (mission statement), nobody prepares for anything (they are googling it during the call), it is not optional (they just call you), everything is summarized in an email afterwards, the email does not differ in any way from the email you would have written without the skype call.
some clients prefer to meet me before i start working for them (not going to happen) - the next thing is they want a skype video chat (not going to happen, i work naked) - then audio (hey, i'm online with a mobile data stick, not going to happen) - then they want a skype chat session ... i'm yet looking for arguments against chat sessions.
i once uninstalled skype, but the argument "i don't have skype" didn't work....
If you're not willing to work with someone and compromise, you aren't giving off the right unconsciously-parsed social signals, and you'll scare off the best clients.
Clearly there's more to the meeting issue or people wouldn't be shouting the same advice into the wind 40+ years later.
Here's a good summary: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020464260457721...
Not having meetings for things you should have a meeting is very dangerous - and making some stupid rules like no chairs or lock the doors is also dangerous. You see, you need these stupid things because people organizing meetings don't know how to organize, prepare, led and moderate a meeting: spend some time coaching younger employee to learn how to do that (ha coaching ... that is something we really forget to do because it is not writing code)
In other words, meetings are not bad: people organizing, preparing, leading, and moderating meetings are bad.
The hardest meeting to lead are "brainstorming meetings" and I was lucky that my EVP was master of them: many interesting and break-thru algorithm happend there.
This is ten times worse with video conferencing.
One thing that surprised me about Google is that we have meetings and they proceed in exactly the same way every single time. The end result is a bunch of angry engineers, not new ideas.
Silent air is a poor medium of transmission. In order to efficiently multiplex communication, you need a good protocol. That's what rules of order do: they impose a protocol between the participants that establishes who can speak when, and on what topic.
It's fusty and old fashioned, but it works. I've seen absolute screaming matches that nevertheless 1) reached conclusions and 2) were legally valid. The chair had to constantly shut down the screaming, had to evict several troublemakers from the meeting and to follow the rules with tyrannical strictness, but it worked.
That's almost the worst case possible for a meeting (the worst is descent into riot). Rules of order, like any technology, work well if properly applied.
* Always stand-up while meeting.
* Not everyone can lead a meeting. Ask someone how can to lead the meeting. This can even be someone without interest in the subject.I ask:"Am I needed" and if the answer is yes I ask: "For what?"
After that it's pretty easy to figure out whether I should go or not. The important part is to realize that YOU are the judge of whether your presence is needed, not your PM or any other.
I think I have dodged probably 80% of meetings that way and I know I have not missed out on a single thing ever.
I also make the habit of showing up when I need and leave again when I am not needed.
How do you deal with irrational humans who attach a bunch of unintended meaning to your actions? For example, some people will think you are arrogant, or rude, or uncooperative. I know you're not, you know you're not, but how do you persuade them that you're just being efficient?
Why should I? If I work at a place where thats an issue I shouldn't work there anyway cause that means the place is going to be a place I want to leave sooner rather than later.
http://www.techdisruptive.com/2011/05/10/the-15-minute-meeti...
People who use the term "mission statement" are usually people of the meeting holding variety. That and memorandum of understanding, vision etc.
For a while, we had a scrum master contracting with us that ran meetings with an iron fist. She didn't take any bullshitting or digressing from the point. It was awesome. I miss her all the time.
Also, rule 4 doesn't make sense for two reasons. The first is that the idea of a stand-up meeting is that it's mandatory: get everyone together to quickly thrash out what's blocking them. Just because you're not blocked doesn't mean you're not blocking someone else, plus it helps keep everyone on the same page. Secondly, the rule contradicts itself - meetings aren't mandatory, unless you need to be there. So... you don't have to be there, unless you have to be there, in which case you have to be there?
If you know what you're going to say, put it in a damned email. If I have a question, I'll reply. Then you can craft a thoughtful and correct answer as time allows while consulting any necessary reference material, instead of talking out of your ass.
You also look cool by violating the laws of physics. People don't have to actually attend a "meeting" to be there, they just have to gasp read their email! Amazing!
E-mail is dreadful for anything that tends to go off-course (needs to be chaired) or requires rapid discussion with evolving arguments.
Either you're confusing "peers with a whiteboard" with "meetings", or you're living on a completely different planet from me.
I guess I have different meetings to you.