One of my employers actively discouraged meetings and phone calls. They wanted everything done through Slack and email.
It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication.
Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration.
The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style.
So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.
I've found that, with the exception of daily stand-ups, all meetings must have a bullet point agenda and notes should be sent out for each meeting with risks, action items, issues and ownership of those items. If both of those things are lacking, I doubt how useful the meeting will be or was.
Not only do those things make meetings more productive, they increase the overhead to calling a meeting.
We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance. That's especially true for things with large "multipliers". An unscripted meeting might take one hour for the person calling it, but eat 10 hours of other people's time (plus interrupt them). Adding an hour of prep and summary for the caller lowers that ratio a bit so everyone has a more similar view of the meeting.
That's rarely grounds to make things harder with no benefit, but meeting prep has very solid benefits. Even in terms of time wasted, a clear agenda keeps meetings from dragging on, and routing minutes/summary after the fact avoids repeating discussions or inviting people who only need to listen.
>We don't often celebrate making things harder to do, but adding friction to something that's happening too often can help bring it back into balance.
Sometimes friction creates abrasion and waste. Sometimes it creates the traction necessary to actually move forward without sliding all over the place like a hot mess.
I can't believe I've never thought of it in physical terms before! This is perfect!
I'm working on some of our internal screens at work and part of this is me really trying to get things right and easy for everyone. However, yeah, there _are_ things that should be hard to impossible to do because they shouldn't be doing them and we've entered the realm of needing to coordinate with people and raise flags that something errored along the way.
At first people thought of it in terms of the needless waist friction that had become so prevelant, but soon came to realize that it was a good friction telling them they were off the beaten path, allowing them to hand stuff over to their managers and get problems taken care of before causing problems for customers, wasting customer services time as well as causing us to expend more resources to correct the mistake.
Like you said, friction in just the right places allows good things to happen.
I see it as putting more of the cost of the meeting onto the caller, rather than spreading it amongst the participants via wasted time and energy (or the dreaded re-convene since no one was ready).
(There have been some really interesting displays of this, like Robot 9k avoiding chat spam, or Kingdom of Loathing's 3-question "test" for joining global chat.)
Print fiction stories are higher average quality than web-published or fan-fiction, because they costs money to produce. Nobody prints and binds 500 words of unfinished, unedited rambling, but they certainly put it on AO3. But it turns out there's a lot of stuff that's interesting and valuable, yet too niche or awkwardly sized to justify printing.
So I guess there are two questions. First, does the barrier to entry improve the overall quality of the thing, or just weed out the weakest examples? Charging anyone who calls a meeting $10 would avoid some stupid meetings, but requiring an agenda can also improve worthwhile meetings. Second, are the marginal examples worth having? For a short story in a database, sure. For a five person meeting? Definitely not.
Allocating and drawing down a meeting budget pool might assist with this.
As a positive incentive, a countering "attending" pool, also budgetable. Meetings with strong appeal would be compensated from that.
Not sure what to do with the Imaginary Meeting Points at the end of the year, though possibly use it as the basis of some sort of merit award or bonus.
At a bare minimum, teams that plan via "story points" or other time units ought to count meetings in those scores. When they don't, you start getting teams that either "get nothing done" or have to work nights and weekends because planning meetings are displacing all their intended work.
For actually tracking Meeting Points, one option might be to make them a project metric? As in: "We predict our project will consume 21 Meeting Points, if we go over 25 that's a failure to be analyzed afterwards like overruning schedule or budget, if we're under 15 we're probably budgeting wrong".
Properly designing incentive systems in a realm of pervasive externalities and nonobvious costs and benefits is difficult.
I'm not saying the market/cost approach is necessarily the best or appropriate. But it's an interesting thought experiment to work through it.
Sometimes imposing arbitrary requirements (e.g., "have an agenda") is a cheaper way of effecting the same ends. Though Goodhart's Law is another pitfall.
I'm not certain it is a good idea to to that but let me try to come up with a more constructive way to do it:
Of course people shouldn't pay to do their work, so this must be taken from their allocated budget. If they don't have a budget they cannot invite anyone without the permission of someone who has a budget and think the meeting is a good idea.
in contracting this is not uncommon. one employer I worked for bid on a contract that was later revised down by 75 percent. meetings were curtailed to save money precisely because of the cost to the customer. budget sensitivity is a valuable tool to fight time wastagement.
I was at a company that employed thousands of people.
They did a company wide training on effective meetings.
Set agendas, notes, and etc were all part of their training. It was great.
I never saw a single person do those things... not the VPs, not the CEO, nobody. I did it for my meetings as a sort of invisible act of defiance, but nobody ever read them before the meeting and most didn't know meeting invites came with anything other than the time, date, location info :(
> "People don't do concrete things any more," he says.
I (dev) and my team certainly do.
To that end, I've started putting a standard caveat at the end of all my team meeting reminders on chat: Everyone is optional, but everyone who goes must have read the agenda and linked pre-reading.
First couple of times I did that, some people self-called-out as not having read the notes (after asking questions specifically addressed in the notes). After that it's been mostly good. People have thanked me for my efficient meetings, but all I did was to make people read the agenda :)
"Therapy" meetings certainly have their place, and I've personally grown a lot as a person in those. We have one (retro) every two weeks. But if most meetings in your organization are better thought of as therapy meetings... well, it's no surprise people don't do concrete things any more.
This is the biggest problem where I've seen companies try to do this. The C-level and senior management team make a big fuss about how the company is having too many pointless meetings, they need to be effective, short and have agendas... and usually you can count in hours the time before the one of the exact same senior managers has sent a 2 hour, 20-person invite titled "project catch up" with a blank body.
(You can probably generalise this to many company initiatives, not just the ones about meeting habits.)
It feels like in almost every office kitchen I've been in in Norway there is some sort of label that say something that is supposed to be witty like: your mother does not work here, tidy up after yourself.
It mostly doesn't work.
Three places I worked had tidy kitchens. None of them had these labels, but more importantly: in all three of them management would fix it if others didn't. I guess most people only see their bosses boss tidy up a couple of times before they realize everyone is supposed to do that.
If my boss is too fancy to recook coffee so am I. Communal assets only work out if they are properly cared for by almost everyone except the usual antisocial free-riders who you have to ignore.
I started refusing any meetings that didn’t say their purpose and desired outcome. I’m a schmeg so it just made people stop scheduling meetings with me and that was pretty good.
People seem really busy and tell me they are too busy to plan their meeting or prepare for mine. It’s a viscous cycle.
I prefer meetings with just one clearly defined purpose that all participants agree is worth having a meeting for. Like "what are you currently working on?" (the daily stand-up), "what are we going to do this next sprint?" (the planning), "what is the best way to fix this problem we have?", "where do we want to be in 3 (or 6) months?".
As soon as there's more than one point on te agenda, the meeting is going to be a drag for half the participants.
(Of course that single purpose often still requires prep from the organiser and/or other participants.)
Ever since I started ending time budgeting for each agenda item I've never looked back.
My agendas look like this:
(1) Two word emotional check in [Lead:Jd][budget: 5 minutes, actual: ]
(2) How did sprint one go? [Lead:Mark][budget: 7 minutes, actual: ]
(3) Should we have pizza or chinese food for lunch? [Lead:Francis][budget: 3 minutes, actual: ]
I send out the agendas in advance for anyone to PM me to add something.
Then I use a stop timer to track how many minutes were used per agenda and send it along with the minute meetings and action items post-meetings. Action items are almost always tracked some sort of issue tracker but I use different ones for different projects.
Agreed but it also applies to standups. I think if you just want ambient awareness, have people post their daily "what I did/will do" to Slack. No need to derail every single day for half an hour or more.
Doesn't mean that isn't what people are calling a "standup".
More seriously, even if standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory, no interruption takes less than half an hour to recover from and resume flow.
> standup actually were 5 minutes like it should be according to theory
Jeff Sutherland who invented scrum thinks it should be 15 minutes, so according to theory they should be 15 minutes:
> The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Development Team. The Daily Scrum is
held every day of the Sprint. At it, the Development Team plans work for the next 24 hours. This
optimizes team collaboration and performance by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum
and forecasting upcoming Sprint work. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each
day to reduce complexity
Scrum, Agile etc. is a nonsense which should be ended. The one reason why it is so popular is that it provides managers with opportunity to organize meetings - stand ups, planning, retrospectives,...
Why in the world would anyone reach out to other people to figure out what to do in the next 24 hours? The development of even a minor feature takes longer than that, and contrary to Agile principles cannot be arbitrarily split into smaller parts.
I find 15-minute, daily "sync meetings" to be an invaluable tool in coordinating the efforts of an organization with many moving parts.
The meeting chair (senior engineer) goes around the room and we all have the same list of items to report on each day. It helps avoid duplication of effort and also increases coordination in pursuit of objectives.
Not just an agenda but, if possible, an explanation for why each invitee is being invited and what they are expected to bring to the table. I can't count the number of meetings I show up to with only a foggy notion of why I was included or what important context I need to be aware of before discussion.
A counterpoint is that I've seen that people get appointed to handle those things and the recurring meeting happens but with additional overhead and people involved. Source: working in government
At one startup I was lucky/early enough to have the leverage to declare this as a policy (for me). If I didn't have minimally an agenda with a clear owner and at least one listed decision (or, rarely, a sensible request for inform only meeting) I wasn't going to attend. It got a bit of friction at first but increased the effectiveness of meetings by about 80% I think. It was nice while it lasted.
As a project manager who runs and attends a lot of meetings :) I recommend these two books about planning and running effective meetings:
* "Effective Meeting Skills" by Marion Haynes is a short workbook from 1988. It looks dated, but the material is still relevant and a quick read. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0931961335/
* "The Surprising Science of Meetings: How You Can Lead Your Team to Peak Performance" by Steven Rogelberg. This 2019 book is great and includes useful findings from real studies of meetings. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0190689218/
Agree that enforcing meeting discipline is key. Banning meetings altogether seems like a crazy idea. We are social creatures after all, and often a 5 minute conversation can save 10 or more emails or 30 "chat minutes".
Amazon has a very interesting approach to meetings that I'm curious if anyone has first hand experience with, or other thoughts. For those that aren't aware - Jeff Bezos famously banned PowerPoint, and has people prepare a (max 6 page I believe) written memo for every meeting. Then there's time at the beginning of the meeting carved out for reading the memo - after which people will start talking.
I can imagine that this does a few things - it creates a barrier to actually scheduling meetings - so people don't do it as often. And, it ensures participants can have meaningful, detailed conversations.
We're not social, we are tribal, we need to show dominance on our peers and in person it works best.
Being the king of slack serves no purpose.
What Bezos does (if it's true) is just apply common sense (let's solve this real issue and only this one quickly by talking about it an only about it because we are the ones who can solve it and no one else) to a workplace where people are payed so much that it shouldn't even be possible to have non meaningful meetings.
But this is the kind of world we live in nowadays...
Yea Slack really is the worst. My job has plenty of meetings, but still uses Slack a lot: I'll never understand how companies can be productive with a heavily Slack-based workflow.
The fact that my coworkers don't seem to understand the value of keeping a distinction between async and sync communication caused me to recently turn off my Slack notifications, and it's been incredible. I'm much, much more productive than I was before, and the amount of people who actually needed a synchronous response from me was a small fraction of the pings I get (I use DnD so people can click an option to notify me if necessary).
I've started turning down meetings too, or at least gating them with a request for a specific agenda: it turns out half the time, I can point them to some docs or answer them directly without needing to interrupt my routine for half an hour+.
The difference in my productivity is truly insane, and it's come at an extremely minor cost of the teams and teammates that work with me having to be more thoughtful about what they need. (and of course, I still take plenty of meetings, since sometimes conversations need to be open-ended)
> the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style
Nit: I've always heard this called synchronous, since in this style work is performed immediately, rather than queued up to wait for execution at a scheduled time.
> Nit: I've always heard this called synchronous, since in this style work is performed immediately, rather than queued up to wait for execution at a scheduled time.
I referred to meetings as synchronous because they acquire a lock on everyone's time, at a specifically scheduled time on their calendar.
I refer to Slack and e-mail communication as asynchronous because you're not explicitly locking other people's calendars, but those other people are expected to read and respond to the notifications all throughout the day.
If you never know when the next important "@here" conversation is going to pop up in one of your Slack channels, the only way to have a seat at the table is to be always on, always connected.
I don't agree, there is nothing requiring them being synchronous since anyone can send a message at anytime and the response can be delayed an arbitrary amount of time unlike a meeting which has a definite start and stop. That certainly sounds asynchronous to me.
Yes, and this is exactly the problem with Slack: it tries to shoehorn both modes into a single mechanism.
Asynchronous communications must be structured fundamentally differently from synchronous ones in order to be effective. Trying to merge them into a single mechanism is a horrible mistake.
Async communication is what email is for! People who use Slack for sync communication are hopelessly confused (obvious tell: async doesn't notify you). This obviously only applies to DMs, @heres, and tags: public channels are just async modes that can smoothly transition into sync
I find phonecalls less disruptive, they happen once, and the issue is addressed. If it is dragging too long, we move it to a meeting.
A chat session can continue indeterminate amount if time, keep flaring up and distracting you as different people chime in from half-afk half-paying attention standpoint.
Technically, you can demand an immediate response via email (and in some industries, this is quite common). It's the expectations around the channel that matter.
Agreed, but I would say that chat channels (and especially 1:1 chat pings) typically have expectations closer to immediate mode compared to other mediums. Because they typically cause a notification and break in concentration, I label them as "synchronous." Any communication medium that does not have notifications and only works via me polling it is asynchronous.
You could summarize and say "edicts cause unintended consequences". Nature (and by extension, humanity) doesn't operate on booleans, and it's lazy to assume so. It takes work to identify positive behaviors and incentivize them, and identify negative behaviors and disincentive them. Treating the symptoms with an edict will almost always result in new and interesting things that you never knew you didn't want. Your example is great.
That sounds like a super interesting learning experience. What were the justifications for no meetings at all, out of interest?
Edit: Bleh, I misunderstood; just discouragement of meetings. It'd still be interesting to hear the reasoning (especially if it deterred people from holding meetings in favour of Slack)
A low volume of meetings, ideally visible to all staff on company calendars, with well-documented titles & purposes before the meeting, and transcripts/recordings for later reference afterwards (especially to handle any especially controversial decisions or discussions) is what I'd consider a 'gold standard'.
There's still the potential for people to try to back-channel discussions via in-person meetings and various other means, but at least it makes transparency the default, and allows questioning the paper trail.
Also: none of this should necessarily detract from the fact that, for some people, they may psychologically benefit from what we are discussing as 'pointless meetings' and airing their voice / asserting their status.
If that's genuinely helping those people, I think there's a place for it (even if it might not be what a purpose-driven engineer or mission-driven entrepreneur might want to see at their organization).
> That sounds like a super interesting learning experience. What were the justifications for no meetings at all, out of interest?
They thought it would increase speed of execution. Instead of finding the first available calendar slot that works for everyone 3 days from now, why not just have the conversation immediately in Slack? Get answers fast and then move on.
They also wanted to avoid gathering more people than necessary for longer than required. The idea was that engineers could quickly check the "@here" message, decide if it's relevant or not, and then get back to their work.
Good intentions, but it increased the volume of notifications immensely. Taking a single day off of work meant that I had to sift through well over 100 Slack notifications when I got back to my computer. A mix of @here, @channel, my name being tagged with 10 other people, or impromptu private message meetings. I uninstalled RescueTime because it was too depressing to see a minimum of 2-3 hours per day spent in Slack. I'd gladly trade those 2 hours of Slack time for 2 (or more) hours of efficient, well-run meetings.
Did your employer discourage all meetings or just recurring ones? I find ad-hoc meetings to be pretty useful. It's the recurring ones that drive me batty.
The side effect of having all meetings on slack is that you get note taking for free and will always have the discussion and data points logged down and searchable forever. I find this to be extremely useful when looking back on decisions made and finding context on why they were made.
> But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.
I completely agree. A meeting can be extremely valuable when you have clear goals, an agenda, and clear reasons why every participant is needed/needs to be there.
One tendency I see and hate is when someone calls a 1 hour meeting, finishes the (usually underbaked) agenda in half an hour, but now they feel the need to pad the remaining half hour with whatever they can dredge up. Instantly turns the meeting from "a good use of half an hour" to "a bad use of one hour".
> calls a 1 hour meeting, [...] but now they feel the need to pad the remaining half hour with whatever
that's a wild way to run meetings — in my current organization, finishing a meeting ahead of schedule (when appropriate) is celebrated as "giving time back".
I have to say it's really frustrating to duplicate functionality (in any way). This is what has happened to Slack, Quip, Salesforce and for that matter Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
I want one way to view code (Vim), one way to view a .jpg (feh), one way to ask quick questions (IRC), one way to quickly browse text (Lynx), one way to communicate structured messages (email)... but alas it falls apart due to the fact that we work as social creatures.
Slack is a useful product that is so frequently and heavily abused that an argument could potentially be made it shouldn't exist at all.
A friend of mine showed me her work slack for a company of ~100 people and no joke, they have over 20 channels for non-work purposes that are entirely random (#cupcakeparty) and are frequently contributed to with nothing valuable. Based on personal experience, I suspect that's not too unique.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that - it’s a form of community building. The problem in my experience is slack’s over enthusiastic notification defaults. If Sue and Joe are chatting about an upcoming office party in a general channel, that’s great - just so long as my devices don’t tell me about it until I explicitly open that chat channel.
> A friend of mine showed me her work slack for a company of ~100 people and no joke, they have over 20 channels for non-work purposes that are entirely random (#cupcakeparty) and are frequently contributed to with nothing valuable. Based on personal experience, I suspect that's not too unique.
Okay, what is wrong with that? My company has dozens of goofy slack channels that are full of people goofing around. I don't particularly care for them, so I don't join them. But I do get some amount of joy from the fact that others are having fun on those channels...
If you used IRC, you'd have the same kind of deal. If you just used email, you'd have goofy aliases that people created (unless you worked for some grumpy, stoogy company or the government)
Non-developers really don’t understand how bad it is to be interrupted when “in the zone”.
I am way more productive if left to check email/slack of my own accord, when an appropriate time presents itself.
Recently, having become a home worker, I’ve found that meetings are quick & to the point, and it’s anti rely because of the group video element. Makes meetings seems worthwhile and productive.
Wouldnt due dates solve some of this problem? Either "we arent going to talk about this again as a group for 48h", or "you have one week to prepare for us to revisit this."
It still allows you to multitask and be in multiple meetings at once, without allowing people to start initiatives before people are prepared. Not perfect, but sounds like a step forward in a no-meeting culture.
> Wouldnt due dates solve some of this problem? Either "we arent going to talk about this again as a group for 48h", or "you have one week to prepare for us to revisit this."
Not really. Once you start adding specific dates around when people can discuss things, you've just reinvented meetings in a less efficient medium.
The key is proper mentoring, coaching, and expectation setting. If meetings are becoming a problem, work on coaching people how to run healthy meetings. If you just ban meetings, the same bad habits just spill over into less efficient mediums and create even more problems.
The issue is for whatever reason even data-driven people don’t measure anything around meetings. Since almost no one has had proper training and have no feedback loop, it becomes very difficult to identify what is necessary v. what isn’t. Meetings shouldn’t be removed altogether, they should be measured for effectiveness and then tools can be implemented to run them properly.
Information exchange meetings are useless and a source of boredom. What‘s important are decision meetings - and this is where you need a precise agenda and where you always need to communicate the expected outcome.
Pointless meetings are just a part of meetings. Imo you can't have valuable meetings without pointless ones. Knowing how to best minimise the toil is key.
It felt great at first. Having a wide-open calendar and knowing that random managers can’t pull you into a waste of time meeting seems like a dream come true. However, we quickly learned that removing meetings doesn’t removed the need for communication.
Instead of scheduled meetings, our Slack channels turned into never ending pseudo-meetings. Instead of the well-defined start times of a meeting and the implicit expectation that meeting participants come prepared with an agenda and material to discuss, we had a spontaneous free-for-all in Slack. People could, and would, start important team discussions in Slack at random times all day long. “@here” started to feel no different than a meeting, except it was unpredictable, you couldn’t prepare for it, and it would certainly disrupt your concentration.
The other unintended side effect was that people were still scheduling secret meetings. They just had to be quiet about it because technically we weren’t supposed to do it. The teams with regularly scheduled meetings were more cohesive, less disrupted, and significantly less stressed than those who tried to handle everything in the asynchronous “always on, always connected” style.
So yes, excessive, unnecessary, or poorly-run meetings are bad. But I never thought I’d miss properly run meetings as much as I did when they were removed completely from our communication toolbox. Use the right tool for the right job and enforce good meeting discipline.