How do we make remote meetings not suck? (2018)
chelseatroy.com
chelseatroy.com
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 get resolved the thing the meeting is about. This isn't enforced it's just a natural consequence of someone booking a meeting.
Most meetings are between 2-5 people. Large recurring meetings are maybe max 12-15 people. In the large meeting, there is a rough agenda and everyone speaks to their part of the agenda in turn. Anyone can speak up if they have something relevant to add but otherwise they are muted. This is usually when I get my laundry folded.
- Meetings must have a purpose. (to echo you above)
- The meeting must have a result, some sort of action or next step. Only one.
- When the meeting has created a result to address the purpose, the meeting is over.
- Someone runs the meeting. They decide when the result has been achieved. (to echo you above)
- Someone (explicitly not the meeting runner) takes notes, action items, etc, and records the purpose and result.
- The rule is, you invite people who are required to achieve the result. Other people, marked as optional, may attend if they feel they are necessary. Otherwise, optional attendance defaults to not attending.
- No recurring meetings, no "informational updates", those we call something else. A hangout. A discussion. A presentation.
Which means I just keep on working during the meeting listening with half an ear.
This is especially applicable to reoccurring meetings where the manager is talking to the team, getting progress reports, working through the jira list and so on.
This actually makes for a really productive meeting. I can fill the dead time with admin tasks, but I'm also somewhat aware of what else is happening. Last month it became clear one team member was struggling (for days) trying to do something outside their experience. I offered to make an example, and got him onto the right track.
It's taken a long time to get used to these regular progress meetings (and I imagine pre-covid they were done in person and insanely frustrating) but now I gave the rhythm of them I just keep working.
One tip I noticed, if Roger should comment on what I'm about to say then say "hey roger" at the start of the piece not " what do you think roger" at the end. :)
I do this without thinking. I even add some fluff or delay between the "hey roger" so that Roger has time to context-switch before I ask the question because you know everyone is multitasking during these meetings.
I think this might be WHY remote meetings work so well when they work.
They aren't meetings like a board room meeting. They are like sitting in a room with colleagues and occasionally communicating.
If everyone has to pay attention, the meeting had better be worth n x salary x hours.
If you can sort of be there and sort of not, it costs very little.
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.
“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.”
What qualifies as wasted time and how are cameras a contributing factor?
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.
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.
> 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
This seems to be a dichotomy between "producing Being Present In A Meeting" (a short documentary film of a person staring directly at the camera, knowing that looking away will be interpreted negatively; a species of hostage video), and participating in a conversation.
And some of that is important! I'm not going to go full robot and say that all comms must be professional-only. But there's a tension between people who like that and people who don't, and cameras make it worse because you're under surveillance for whether or not you're doing something else instead of not participating in a chat you can't be bothered with.
I constantly say that the push against WFH is all coming from extroverts that are mad that they can't steal energy from the rest of us.
Normally I am pretty hardcore that meetings need an agenda (can be loose) and intended outcome when the meeting invitation is sent out, or else I don’t attend.
BUT our small founding team has an exception: we have a daily, morning, remote, agendaless meeting. It’s the opposite of a standup: you can talk about anything. Sometimes it’s things that have fallen through the cracks; I can’t help doing standupy things myself (“this is what I’m doing today in 20 seconds” but that’s just me;) we also hear that so and so’s daughter just got engaged, someone else will be busy coz their spouse will be having a procedure today and they want to drop them off/get them from the hospital, etc. it’s to provide the “water cooler” experience of in the office. Important things get decided too. And we skip sometimes, perhaps one day every other week, since it’s like a bus and will come around tomorrow again.
We do overlap in person at times in the lab but they aren’t awkward because we all have a common social context.
It won’t scale as we grow, unfortunately.
Thinking about this, I can see pretty clearly how this could be translated into work meetings pretty easily and fits with a lot of the other commentary here.
But bottom line, either the meetings will suck or they won’t and what matters is not whether they’re in-person or remote but how they’re run.
> ... because we (a) ... and (2) actually
Why are you (consistently) follow "(a)" with "(2)"? Is this an AI thing?
Apologise, now.
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.
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.
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.
I searched a bit online but it doesn’t seem to be a well established term
Agreed the post is confusing and could have used a summary of the preceding piece to be intelligible.
https://chelseatroy.com/2018/03/29/why-do-remote-meetings-su...
This is the part I agree with the most. I'm not sure about the rest.
I can only speak from the perspective of a software engineer. Many meetings, especially daily standups, do not prioritize and filter out user stories and tasks causing them to take way too long. People zone out making the meetings less effective. It's basically weaponized on some projects especially when the management doesn't have a clue what's going on. It enables the blame game e.g. "well why didn't you say something during the meeting?"
It's usually pretty clear what should be discussed, but it's rare to see a project manager who looks at the activity stream on Jira or equivalent. There's usually a huge disconnect between management and dev teams in general, even on a relatively "well run" project where everything goes as planned with minimal friction. Devs wind up picking up a lot of slack and just have their own informal meetings amongst themselves to remedy it.
This is terrible long term. Every project I've ever been on inevitably hits a snag and all this unravels into management going into freak out mode when they realize how big these communication gaps have become.
As I worked for a Japanese company, these ideas found stony soil, but now that I'm on my own, I try to keep this policy.
If a meeting is held so each person can update a leader with his/her status, those updates can also be emails. If the whole group needs to see those updates, it can be a wiki or a shared document.
A meeting should only be called when that group of people needs to discuss a topic together and reach a consensus or make a decision. If it's just for communicating information, there are better, asynchronous alternatives.
For example, if I am presenting information for a group, and this is going to cause stress or discord, I need to know quickly how the group reacts so that I can either adjust the plan, clarify the communication, or know I have work to do to manage the relationship. Latency matters here because these delays can cause people's lives to be worse because I wasn't able to monitor body language.
Status meetings seem like something that can be replaced by an email, but it turns a manager's job from coordination to task assignment. Example: "Who can help?" versus "Jane, go help John, and Ted, go review this code, and Jane, after that redirect to this customer support request." It may be that Ted already knows the answer, and that John knows how to quickly handle the customer support request, but that's not going to be resolved via email. And unless you have everyone wired to slack, it's going to waste everyone's time. (Wiring everyone to slack is the worst of both worlds.)
The goal should be that the team is organizing around the problem, but that means that the team is talking in low-latency methods. Email does not get there. Latency matters. (So does bandwidth, but time spent on the wrong thing doesn't help anyone.)
Well explained.
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 own ways and write up questions. After 20 minutes or so, start discussing the document. This way, the presenter doesn't have to drone on about things that everyone knows, and one can focus on real questions.
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).
Or admit that their de facto purpose is to socialize on company time, which is something that should be done but is hard to quantify
If you blindly rebalance meetings based on "caucus score", you'll get less ideas from the loud people and more ideas from the quiet people ("A"). You won't necessarily get better ideas overall ("B").
IMO, the "floor" should be given primarily to people with a track record of clearly and concisely expressing novel and good ideas, no matter how loud or quiet those people are. Figuring out who those people are is hard and probably can't be nicely described in a blog post.
No one has a meaningful contribution for every topic, and most people don't have the self-awareness to know whether their contribution is meaningful or not. Any good meeting structure has to be able to handle that common situation in a safe and healthy way.
The only other article that really feels like it nails a nagging problem that I've never been able to articulate but stumbled across often is "Why developers don't water the plants" https://yorkesoftware.com/2017/05/03/why-dont-developers-wat...
[1]: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/total-rewards/compensat...
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...
I don't even know who to blame for this. It's really not much better than it was in person. In person meetings sucked more, as you had to be physically present to be talked at, and at least with a remote meeting I can just minimize the meeting and try to get back to work.
I would estimate 90% of my meetings are useless. 50% of the 10% remaining could be emails, and 50% are probably worth it. Why can't I just build software? Perhaps PMs and management should get their own meeting where they can just listen to themselves talk.
In the past was common having meetings in a physical room, because the office was a needed tool due to paper-based workflows, and since attending demand certain time not only to meet but also to prepare the meeting, going to the right place and so on they was organized in certain formats. Things are, or should and must be different, but most fails to understand how to use new tools properly.
In the modern connected world attending a meeting is damn cheap, but we also have other tools to collaborate and depending on the task such other tools are better. Having searchable text trails, developing certain topics slowly a message at a time, having few "spontaneous" meetings between only few, than openly discussing something often is much better. But you should know modern tools and all must use them seriously.
I genuinely propose a three strike policy where professional employees are to be fired after three occasions where they demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to read and comprehend important business communications less than two pages or 6 paraphrases in length. This includes emails and internal publications, but not async communication on platforms like Slack, Teams, or non-recorded verbal meetings (digital or otherwise), nor does it include verbal conversations with colleagues in person or otherwise.
I freely admit to wanting a business environment where email communication and content is considered sacred in commercial contexts. Where it’s unacceptable to not only be familiar with but understand well the contents of an email that is now the subject of a meeting or otherwise directly important the content of one’s work.
I’ve tried to right this “meeting should be an email” battle but the reality is shocking: nobody reads anything, for the most part, and when they do, they act like they didn’t.
Reading compression is a faux pa, better to get the accreditation that comes from an in person discussion.
This is the sort of rant that I’m sure I’ve run afoul of as well. But I stand by it regardless. The reason that we have meetings instead of emails is incredible simple: people do not read and comprehend emails.
Your failure to communicate clearly here is one of the most ironic and (presumably unintentionally) hilarious things I've read in some time.
>people do not read and comprehend emails.
Why do you think that is the case? It seems like a simple thing to do
Email is also slow. Instant messaging is where it's at, but most people's reading comprehension and writing are not at the level where that's the only viable medium.
Exactly. "This meeting could have been an E-mail" is only true if people read and respond to their E-mail. I usually will try E-mail first, but if I don't get a response or if the expected action is not taken--I sigh and break out the meeting invite.
It's actually even more insidious than a lack of reading comprehension.
It's a lack of retention in memory. People read an email, it blends in with all the other email they read, it lacks salience, it's the metaphorical "in one ear, out the other". Text lacks immediacy so it doesn't get attention, retention, or action.
This is, needless to say, not a solvable problem within any given team, company, or industry.
Edit: The irony of writing this in a HN comment does not elude me.
And when no or very few emails get sent, no on really pays attention to them. I haven't even opened the company email in a week because there is never anything interesting there.
I really wish writing would be emphasized more in job interviews. I have seen some that emphasise written communication, but it's relatively rare.
Writing an email tends is harder than having a meeting, because you (generally) need to understand the problem to talk about it. This is true of both providing information about the problem and for asking questions about it. Part of writing about something is taking the time to understand it.
It can easily take me 20-30 minutes to write an email about something. But, especially in the case of asking for more information about something, it _also_ results in me having a clearer understanding of the topic; because I needed to identify what questions to ask. However, me spending 30 minutes on writing that email means
- I understand the problem better (as noted), AND
- Multiple _other_ people don't spend 15 minutes in a meeting while I solidify my understanding enough to ask the right questions. And that saves a lot more time overall.
That being said, sometimes meetings are the right answer, because there's a gap somewhere and people just don't know what questions to ask; they need to get together and just talk about it.
Some companies overcommunicate, and email can essentially be unusable due to noise. it can be a huge issue if there are multiple modes of communication.
I get communication through email, chats, groups, google doc comments, smart sheets, 3 quality systems, and workday.
As a result, it can take a while for me to circle back to my email inbox and give the messages thoughtful consideration.
By comparison large headcount meetings are gross sadistic and pointless in person regardless of communications format selected. Either they're intended to let a small number of individuals convey information to a larger group (send a goddamn email already, if you're really fancy video your canned remarks and send a link to the video in the email), or they're intended to elicit some kind of exchange among a large group, at which point you end up with an hour and a half of nothing of substance being accomplished while some/most/all of the meeting participants are sitting there fighting their soul's urge to simply vacate their body on the spot. Then there's the ever-popular multi-departmental standup meeting, in which a bunch of people convey pointless detail at length about shit that is wildly irrelevant to the jobs of most of the other attendees to no obvious purpose.
Full Disclosure: I intentionally ignore my email under the assumption that if it's really important someone will pick up a phone and call.
On the receiving side: information-delivery presentations are async communications, it's just that historical precedent demands that everyone get a calendar invite to the live taping. Not everyone wants to write and send email, and with the options for consuming recorded content now, that's fine. You can read their slides, watch their presentation at 2x, fly through the transcript, read the AI summary, etc. on your own time.
On the sending side: next time you write a really great email, don't send it. Send a meeting invite so people can watch live while you record yourself reading it to the camera while displaying slides with a bullet-point summary you can have ChatGPT generate for you. Get good at it and you'll quickly get a reputation for being a great communicator - people will genuinely be impressed at how prepared you are and how clear your thinking is.
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.
People shouldn’t feel free to chime in with half-baked ideas in meetings or call meetings willy-nilly any more than they would play horseshoes with equipment from the supply closet, use the company credit card for grocery shopping, or call in sick to play golf.
What appropriate policies look like probably do vary by company and team but the policy shouldn’t just be that anyone with access to the calendar software can call a meeting or that anyone in the meeting can speak at any time.
The lack of structure can be a benefit; it can work, but not when the project requires close coordination. On the other hand, stupid policies can easily hamstring PMs.
If someone really doesn't want to work, I think from the employer's perspective it doesn't make a difference. We could argue physical and mental inconveniences could be seen the same. I guess there will be places were there's a legal split between the two kinds, but I kinda wish there wasn't.
(I'm assuming there's a finite number of days either way)
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.
My main point is simple: hybrid work is dumb: you still need to be near the office, witch typically is in a dense city, where accommodations tend to be tight, so WFH there is not cheaper than the office nor much comfy, you reduce commuting but still need to commute in a dense so unpleasant environment, and you do not have the advantage of single family homes in most cases where you have room for many things at home, from freezers to p.v. and so on. Also offices are even LESS utilized, we already have in cities big buildings used for less than 12h/day with hybrid "home" usage climb but still less than full remote and office usage plunge even more. You need laptops or double desk setup, again wasted resources and/or reduced comfort for what? Just to get physical ads (shops windows) while commuting, the need to commute more simply because being in tighter places you can't stock much at home, all just to make the finance capitalism, the surveillance capitalism to survive a bit more? NO THANKS.
There are some jobs who need desktops and can't be from home, so laptops do have a reason to exists, but they should be niche products not mainstream desktop. So far the idea "a real desktop for anyone is too much resources, while mobile devices, subnotebooks can be given to anyone" prove to be PR bullshit because it sound logic, but given the little useful life of such devices compared to desktop (few years against 8-10-12 years for a personal generic desktop that can still be upgraded partially) and the nearly no recycling prove we waste MUCH MORE resources in building crap: smartphones, tablet, smart watches, TV, ... instead of a single desktop per human. So if we can give a mobile device to any humans we can give a desktop to anyone, if we can't we MIGHT still be able to gives desktop.
Mobile is needed in most cases for slavery, the rest is just a niche. It's about time to understand that, stop the utter style of a desk with a small laptop and a smartphone and a smartwatch and some all-in-ears battery powered crap to have a simple desktop, with a good monitor, a good "conference style" combined device (mic+speaker+cam), a damn trackball and mechanical keyboard. Things built to last at least 8 years for 99% of the people. Less integrated as possible to be less hard to recycle and easier to partially upgrade.
I think these things would help so so much. I wonder if there is any research on the impact of these.
I’m sure there are some research results on how high-quality audio improves meetings – or conversely, how degraded audio degrades communications.
Those research results might not be trivially easy to find however. And I’m sure there’s been less of this kind of research than we’d like.
However! I’m fairly sure that a pretty convincing picture can be assembled through looking at things from different fields of study.
As far as I know, the brain processes any incoming signals. There’s all sorts of filtering going on to extract the meaningful signal. I’m fairly certain that degraded input costs much more brain processing than clear input, probably measurable by MRI or fatigue tests or calorie consumption, if not directly by performance testing on accuracy or response time.
I’m also curious if the field that studies turn-taking in human speech communications doesn’t have something to say about unnatural latency between speakers. Cognitive efficiency and communications efficiency are surely measurable there. Psychoacoustic neuropsychology? idk.
And then I wonder if the entertainment market hasn’t done some research on high-quality reproduction in, say, cinemas? Almost certainly the investment into elaborate audio/video reproduction equipment is data-driven, backed by measurement of audience immersion.
Probably there’s something on high-precision work like remote surgery too.
It’s all valid, it’s all applicable.
The other side of the argument is that humans tend to be argumentative, judgemental, dismissive, and unaware of the extensive refinement and reshaping of sensory inputs that goes on in their heads. So they’ll tend to dismiss inquiries into this, in my experience. It has to be tediously crafted as a suitably high-status pursuit but not too high.
Related from earlier:
Why do remote meetings suck so much?
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.)
any other questions ?