What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
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I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.
I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.
Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.
I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.
> Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite
Same rule here, but enforced.
We are allowed (and encouraged) to cancel or decline invitations without an agenda here.
In my experience, it makes a big positive difference, when people have to justify why they need someone’s time and provide a rough frame for the discussion.
Much more focused, much more efficient. Fewer meeting where I think “I shouldn’t have joined”.
It would be nice if agendas explained each persons role in the outcome and what the exit conditions are for the meeting.
Desired outcomes, minutes of meetings etc. are also part of the default invite template.
Right now I am living the opposite, consulting to a huge company where anyone can convene huge meetings with no agendas, especially if they are a compliance person, or product person.
We have many, many meetings where many people have no idea what the meeting is about, or even worse they will talk about 3 or 4 different topics.
They also practice what I call Rumor Driven Development. It is not fun.
In consulting you tend to encounter this a lot given that its the largest visible symptom of a lot of root problems such as: 1/ no owner 2/ unaligned priorities 3/ a lot of fear or lack of ownership mentality
Generally I push for an agenda and an owner of each topic (or all topics) and a recap, preferably in a transparent location like confluence. Given all the synthesis tools in the market, synthesis has gotten easier.
I also generally push to have leadership realize how costly each meeting is and encourage people to excuse themselves from meetings if they are not: owners, influencers, stakeholders.
If you have a poor agenda you look like a clown and people wont come.
It was him reading tickets off Jira and editing them and randomly asking people about clarifications.
I was a consultant at the time, billing around 100€/hour and there were others along with their own people. That meeting was a) completely useless for 95% of the people there and b) cost about 15k€ easily.
I worked in a couple companies with the "agenda rule" but I worked at one company in particular where it was successful. In that company, leadership had a "no nonsense" type approach and it only took a few reply alls from leaders to meeting requests with "Where is the agenda?" for everyone to fall in line. It also helped that every meeting they sent out contained an agenda.
Leadership comes from the top. That’s what they’re paid for.
If there’s a culture of speaking up and nobody does, sure blame the underlings. But CREATING that culture is the responsibility of management.
Managers needs training, too, and I’m willing to give it if they’re willing to listen. I stick my neck out for really important or really offensive items, but it’s awkward when the culture isn’t there.
Every single time, I wondered if it would be routine, or an acquisition, or a bankruptcy...
One day I mentioned my anxiety to him. He immediately apologized, and from then on, the company-wide meetings had agendas. Eventually that stopped -- when we started doing regular company-wide meetings with a standing agenda.
Sometimes everyone needs to communicate better. Without bug reports, what are you going to fix?
All culture depends on leadership maintaining it. They have the power to not only set culture, mostly, but even more so they have the power to break culture. You can't have a bottom-up culture that'll withstand leadership ignoring or breaking it.
If leadership doesn't inspire trust, that'll spread through the rest of the company very quickly.
This can be dominating high control or anxious/disorganized high control, either way it's a waste of people time.
As soon as I read this line I grimaced. This is a clear sign of an organization that doesn't respect peoples' time. The class should be an email (and proper follow-up by the management chain) establishing three rules:
- Meetings must have an agenda
- After a meeting, there must be a follow-up email describing what was decided and any action items
- Recurring meetings should be rare/exceptional
- Given good meeting notes and action items sent afterwards, reduce the invite list to decision makers; people who need to be informed can be added to the follow-up email
I rode that train until I was fortunate enough to get a moderate buy out.
It's there to make 100% clear that you can't say "I didn't know" when you do something that was explicitly explained in the online class.
So now if a new middle-manager has an agendaless meeting, nobody shows up and they throw a massive fit - people can point at the class and say "It's company policy, deal with it"
I'm the only person I know of who writes real agendas for meetings at my company (which is only about 120 people). It's clearly not caught on, but I do it anyway almost as a protest at this point.
Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.
It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.
Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660
I do like having an adult (rarely me!) in the room who shuts down OT rabbit holes and redirect to appropriate time & place.
These are all remote, geo-distributed teams who only see each other in person about once per year.
I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"
My team has a weekly meeting with no management allowed and no agenda. I bring up anything important right at the start, then we go around and give everyone a chance to say what they're working on. No assignments are given out, but people who need help with something can ask and usually get it.
The main purpose of the meeting is to just keep everyone updated on what the rest of the team is doing and give us some water-cooler time. It makes up, in a small way, for the lack of personal interaction we have since going remote. I keep management out because I want us to be free to speak our minds.
The rest of our meetings are more formal and focused and get more actual work done, but without the "tea party" (I'm starting to like that term) we start losing cohesion as a team.
I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.
And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.
But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.
(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)
I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.
I agree though, for a small team to build a shared understanding and move quickly, just having a chat together is definitely more efficient. I don't think the ideas lined out here apply to that organisation size, however.
like
* "incident-2025-07-28-CI-not-deploying-disk-full" * "feature-stripe-integration" * "exploration-datadog-or-sentry"
and channel comes and go and people are quite "agressive" about routing discussion to the right channel or converting 10+ message thread into dedicated channel.
THIS. I had this at my last gig and it was very successful, but have not been able to replicate at the newer place, because the house keeping is not done, so people end up with the logical conclusion, wrong question that living with a few messy channels is better than living with a bunch of messy channels.
I like lighter weight tools that integrate & help like incident management bots, but the vendors will no longer sell you a cheap, useful & focused tool so instead you're faced with convincing your boss to spend a lot of money on an "enterprise-grade", AI-enabled do everything incident/schedule/status/issue/project management system.
No fluff, no descriptions other than simple labels, no ten paragraph intro blurb, no index, nothing that I would normally skip over when reading someone else's document.
I call these "cheat sheets" and send them out to colleagues on their first day on a project. I've heard feedback along the lines of "I got 10x more value from that one page than three weeks of 'handover' from other people."
Of course it does. Or do you just assume anything you don't personally do must therefore not actually exist/occur?
If you must hand over key parts of your company's infrastructure to external companies, at least ensure you have control of your data if they go sideways. Don't put backups in someone else's hands.
Keep drives encrypted in a safe deposit box if you have to.
People simply don’t read emails, and ignore documents.
I don’t miss emails. Wiki devolves into a mess after a couple of years. Sharepoint has poor accessibility as there’s this constant churning between the app space and the web space.
I really think if you want to get people to take a document seriously you have to present it and walk people through it. If you get feedback and integrate it then it has collective ownership and it’s more interesting than a soliloquy.
But according to the popular glib, and I would say incorrect interpretation of agile principles, documentation is considered wasteful.
Some don’t listen, some won’t read. It’s not only a function of the specific person but also depends on the day who reads and who listens.
So, yeah, in theory, in an ideal world with perfect co-workers you wouldn’t need so many meetings.
In the real, messy world we live in, meetings are one tool to make sure important messages come across.
1) send knowledge to people who need to know it, tell them there's gonna be a Q&A meeting about it in X days.
2) have said meeting.
Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions: 1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting? 2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?
With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)
The OP mentions it at the start, but I will reinforce: meetings suck if you're not prepared; use them to do work (like brain storm or make decisions) not share information. Breaking the "meeting as the big reveal" habit is surprisingly hard, but also solves the "should I attend?" question. To your point #2 a lot of that can be solved without attending if the appropriate prep and follow-up is covered. I don't really like RACI charts, but they do provide some value as a looser guide to thinking through the 2 questions you raise in point 2 above.
https://slate.com/business/2014/05/best-buys-rowe-experiment...
"Results-Only Work Environment" (ROWE) encapsulated treating employees as responsible adults, and letting them make decisions about what they needed to do to get work done, including declining any meetings that wouldn't contribute to productivity.
See also: https://thetreehousepartners.com/review-rowe-results-work-en...
Brainstorming meetings over Zoom, on the other hand...
How to do it right (IMHO): Have several short but rambling hallway conversations about the upcoming topic for 3-4 days before. Take long showers and let your mind wander. Then do the brainstorming session.
Some things I’d add: 1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting 2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates 3. A log of decisions made and by whom 4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.
Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.
1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..
Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"
Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment
Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!
And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.
1. Briefings: meant to disseminate marching orders, find any last minute blockers/disagreements, and clarify any differences in interpretation of those marching orders. These should be infrequent, timed, and formal
2. Brainstorms: development meetings to identify, interpret, and develop action plans for problems, products, ideas, whatever. These should be frequent, open-ended, and informal
That is not how the human brain works. To believe a creative mind is in problem-solving mode when sequestered into 1 hour or 30 minutes social gathering is bizarre. The best technical interactions I've seen happened randomly at a lab when everybody else has left for the day or while at hike chat on a trail during lunch time.
But we've worked together for several years, so he trusts my judgment.
Meeting culture is something that varies hugely between companies and industries and sectors. IMO that means that advice like this has limited utility unless you're aware of the differences. There are a few topics like this.
If the person you'd be telling it to is your boss, you probably don't have much sway to change the culture beyond regular feedback loops.
People in leadership usually get there because they value time and efficiency, and if you don't spin that as "your agenda is trash" but "I cannot contribute to this meeting and would like to pursue my other tasks", I doubt they will be mad at you.
It can also be worth it to bring this up with your team and establish a meeting culture, as suggested in TFA. That way, you can discuss this openly and everyone has a shared understanding of what is okay.
Equally if not way more often they are there, because they like to control things or organize things or like having power or see it as career setup. Or they like working with people.
Time and efficiency is not something you get on these positions.
I understand why it may initially seem frustrating to realize that you are not offering value to the team, but us ICs are used to recognizing that and quickly cutting you out of the picture. It is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Don't worry.
I would certainly be glad to have someone like that over my division.
You've failed as a leader if you find yourself being needed.
If you're of the opinion that management plays their politics game while ICs run the show, then I pity you for the work environment you're in. That isn't how it's supposed to work, and there are better places.
Do they? The entire Agile Manifesto was written about how teams don't need leaders. That doesn't automatically make it valid, of course, but industry was all over it for a time. An entire industry got it wrong? Yes, it wasn't long before "leaders" afraid of losing their job bastardized it into some kind of management framework with nonsense like Scrum[1], granted, but industry support for it also died in that moment. What does that tell you?
> If leaders weren't needed in some capacity, they wouldn't exist.
False premise. The world is full of all kinds of things that exist but aren't needed.
> If you're of the opinion that management plays their politics game while ICs run the show, then I pity you for the work environment you're in.
I'm not really sure what this means. It doesn't seem to have any connection to the original discussion. Where are you going with this?
> That isn't how it's supposed to work, and there are better places.
How is what supposed to work?
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[1] To be fair, Scrum considers itself "training wheels" for Agile. It clearly indicates it is something to use for a short period of time to wean yourself off malformed leadership practices as you transition into Agile. If used as written, it may be a useful tool. But when have you ever seen that happen in practice? In reality, when you find it in use, "leadership" has enforced its use — often modified to their arbitrary fancy — and never let go like it suggests you need to.
Have you read a different manifesto than I did? It spoke of empowered developers and self-organised teams, but never about leaders no longer being required. I'd even say it is directed at leaders to improve the structure of their development teams.
> I'm not really sure what this means. It doesn't seem to have any connection to the original discussion. Where are you going with this?
You seem to imply—at least that's how I understood it—that leaders aren't needed and ICs do their thing regardless of what managers do. Which to me sounds like plain ineffective leadership, not an inherent truth.
We may agree to disagree, but I don't see an entire organisation (not just a single team of developers within a larger organisation) to work completely devoid of leadership. My developers should not have to put up with customer success, or business requirements, or budget constraints. They should focus on working on the product as directed by the product owner. My role is clearing the path in front of the team, keeping distractions at bay, planning ahead for technological changes, and aligning the product trajectory with the company vision. These are things you just cannot do properly while simultaneously focusing on the finer details of application code. And even more importantly, most people I know appreciate good leadership that helps them perform well, and guides them forward. I realise that's subjective though.
Au contraire. You are right that there is only so much time in the day and that not every IC can be deeply engrossed in this, but all should be involved in at least some surface capacity. This is the most important part of the software development process! To remove your software people from it is complete insanity. It being treated as something different under a "leadership" umbrella is the most horrid thing ever seen in the software industry. This is echoed in the Agile Manifest (Twelve Principles), as you know.
And maybe that's what you really mean — that you're an IC who spends less time on code and more time on business problems? That's not what is usually implied by "leadership", but it is understood that anyone can make up random definitions on the spot.
Their body had to be present in the meeting, but they could keep working on their laptop.
This was because WAAAY too much of the silent information about the company products was on their mind and it was by far the fastest way to get it out.
I could just quickly refer to them for 15 seconds to clarify how something actually worked and keep on with the meeting.
...also they once got bored during a sales meeting and coded a full-ass PoC about what the customer was asking during the meeting. That kind of person.
Not 100%, but seems to work.
Or just counter-schedule a meeting in the same slot.
- "I have many meetings already and worry about not meeting deadline".
- "I do not have strong opinions either way, so am fine getting just outcome".
- "I do not have knowledge to be useful".
- "It seems like I wont be useful".
Basically, you can guess these from the topic alone. Most of the time, the response is something like "of course no problem" sometimes followed by short explanation why I was called in. Occasionally they say they indeed want me there.
That said, asserting that most meetings are either brainstorming or decision making, is naive. When an organization grows beyond ~100-150 people (Dumbar's Number) the org must metastasize into smaller, "self-contained", orgs that are far less than that number. Once this happens, there is need for meetings that drive accountability, closure, and alignment at scale. For example, monthly or quarterly business reviews.
These are NOT brainstorming meetings or decision-making meetings. They are meetings where leadership drives accountability and alignment by ensuring light is shined (in a way visible cross-org) on the right topics for the biz.
Depending on how it was implemented, might also be possible to unblind people’s salary. A big no-no for a big corporation where there might be laughable pay disparity.
"Meeting cost calculator" where the cost of the meeting would tick up in real time on the wall.
IIRC the idea was to have everyone tap their keyfob on a reader and it'd get everyone's hourly salary from a database and start counting the price by the minute.
Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?
Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.
Ours are pretty informal, we (unfortunately) use MS Teams which has an agenda & notes section; people are asked to fill in the agenda if they have any points (which is frustrating because getting there isn't easy or obvious), people can write down notes and action points during the meeting (it's a shared and collaborative effort).
You can assign tasks to people's todo lists though, but of course the problem is fragmentation; everyone has their own todo lists, there's Jira for work items, etc.
But you could be right, this might not be the unifying tool for everything but more like number 29 that has never replace the previous 28...
But it's still early days... Zoom's is still really just "let's throw a transcription of the meeting at an LLM with a system prompt and let the chips fall where they may" rather than any sort of major integration yet that would let you do anything like get a live link to your bug tracker to propose a bug based on the conversation pre-filled with the LLM's best guess of the summary of your conversation or anything.
No response, resends email 2 or 3 times
Sends Invitation "Meeting to Agree whether X or Y."
XX replies to original email with an answer
Meeting is cancelled
My former boss wanted to have regular meetings because otherwise it is too easy for cross department projects to fall behind. Nobody prioritizes it, so things will not get done. It (should) cause some amount of embarrassment to go to the weekly meeting for N weeks and say you have still not done X task.
If you can't get someone to commit to that, it sounds like you don't need them in the meeting anyway.
I don't think this advice is generic - there can be different perspectives here.
In a managerial role in a large corpo, doing what could be crudely characterized as office politics, I often have this sort of FOMO - missing out on new initiatives, budgets and projects which would be good for the team; or being unable to prevent others dumping hot potatoes onto us; or just not knowing what is brewing behind the scenes within the company. To a degree, I have to do this so that the technical guys don't have to.
My job, really, is to be invited to as many meeting as I can. I can then ditch the ones I don't think would be useful. Of course, often I sit on meetings that are a complete waste of time - but that is an occupational risk. I don't find these frustrating - they allow me to relax a bit, do my email, learn more about people in the meeting, or just practice my note taking.
Money, exposure, promotion, money.
People who attend more meetings and do less work get higher pay rises and promoted faster. They are also far less likely to be included in rounds of layoffs given their importance to the organisation.
No! Do the opposite of this.
I enjoy the meetings where I can listen in and learn something from others. There can be a lot of value in these meetings — and if truly not, it is easy to slink away.
It is the meetings where the organizer thinks I "must" be there that are always a waste of time. Never fails. Keep me off these invite lists. They are useless.
I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.
As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.
A worthy goal. However I know several people who are apparently unable (or unwilling) to read anything, and instead default to calling a meeting for any sort of communication or knowledge transfer.
The same people who will fuss over $20 lunch expense limits will happily spend thousands on meetings without a thought.
I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”
We typically don't take minutes. Advance agendas are often non existent. And we definitely put a premium on presenting vs written comms
And yes it leads to a lot of FOMO / meetings.
That's a signal for me. A signal, that the author of this shit of an article didn't bother reading his own article before publishing it.
This article brings nothing new useful to the table. That's a rehash of someone else's rehash of something they've read somewhere.
1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?
2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?
3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?
Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.
Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.
In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.
In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.
It's not rude to leave a meeting if there is a competent chair who can set clear beginnings and endings to topics and MC while people enter and exit during transitions.
I've said this before,
The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.
The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.
You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?
As for the author's specific points:
Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.
"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".
"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting
To fix that, the moderator needs to do what I would call "round-robin brainstorming". Each other participant has to have made exactly one point (in seating order or spontaneously) before the first one can make another one. Everyone has to weigh in, and at least for the first 2 or 3 rounds, the moderator needs to enforce this. Usually by then, everyone has warmed up to the idea that their ideas are not that stupid after all, and participation is more equalized.
Edit: about your other points: yes, I agree.
It's not only cynical, it's downright sociopathic if that's the sum of your opinion. Yes, even if you lay down the facts.
[1] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
Deconstructing the corporate psychopath: an examination of deceptive behavior https://www.emerald.com/rbf/article-abstract/10/2/163/368313...
I would praise any leader that has the courage to call the meeting spade a spade knowing they're just corporate-sanctioned babysitting exercises, myth to be discarded.
Are people calling meetings to yap, or with clear and concise goals?
Yappers do not understand the difference because their meetings are not bereft of articulable utility.
Ever.
Also keep the meeting to a 50 minute max.