The time is just a proxy for the importance you place on the meeting.
Simple examples:
In a one-on-one meeting, you're not going to open your laptop. You have to hold up your end.
In a meeting in which you know you will be answering questions, you'll be paying attention.
In a meeting which is about your work and decisions will be made, you pay attention.
Then again, in a meeting which is about work you care about, you pay attention.
Now the antitheses: if the meeting has many attendees, and you don't need to answer questions, and decisions about your work aren't being made... why are you even there? In fact, why are most people there? Is it a group bonding activity? That's a legitimate thing, but it should be fairly infrequent.
Or, in a meeting where one participant does all the talking... That's a lecture and not a meeting. The content can be documented centrally and emailed to everyone.
Sometimes that one participant crowds out the voices of others so no one bothers to speak up... The leader of the meeting needs to be confident enough to interrupt the person taking more than their fair share of time and then try to get participation from others in the group. Being wholly ready to cut off the aggressive personality that wants to constantly talk or repeat the same thing(s) over and over.
Great post Dave. Succinctly put. You're being generous with the email example.. what's worse (and probably more common) is when it's unrelated to work altogether: Instagram.
While I agree if the meeting is important - often one can’t help but be dragged to meetings that are run poorly.
Or situations where ones input is only valuable for a limited period of time or around a certain subject matter.
If it’s an hour long meeting and management or project managers have organised it - chances are I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be getting things done.
Of course I don’t turn up with my laptop open, not only would that be rude it would also be presumptuous as to the quality of the meeting.
However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.
In that last case, apply the law of two feet and just leave - and make it so that anyone can do that if the meeting is just someone trying to be relevant and showing off powerpoint-fu.
Note that this works only well if the law of two feet has been established prior to the meeting.
Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave.
Among others, this avoids awkward situations where you are needed 5 minutes later, and people have to wait for you to come back. In that case, your behaviour would be (rightfully) perceived as passive-aggressive rather than constructive.
> Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave.
Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So much passive aggression, frustration, and abrasiveness injected into the work environment just because people don't have the face to say "Hey guys, if theres nothing else for me/for me to add here im going to drop off the call/go back to my desk."
I do this in about 30% of the meetings im in, probably twice in 5 years someones said they'd actually like me for something they were going to lead onto, and both times it was genuine.
Also, if you run a meeting, and you move onto something that doesnt need all parties, you can just say "So we're going to move onto X, you guys might not be so interested in so feel free to leave, unless of course you want to stay"
Never any hard feelings either way. It just business.
In a perfect world, yes, we should all be empowered to be grown-ups and excuse ourselves from meetings that are useless. For run-of-the-mill useless meetings it's probably good general advice. There's often more to it than whether you have something to add to the meeting:
Sometimes the meeting has no clear agenda, and it's unknown whether you will be needed to contribute. Since you're peripherally involved with the project you're invited. The conversation may flow to some topic you need to weigh in on. These are bad meetings of course but they happen.
Sometimes you're simply expected to be present at a meeting even though you have nothing to contribute and there's nothing to take away that won't be in the e-mailed meeting notes. Your silent attendance is what's important, not whether you're engaged. In these cases, if you don't show up or heaven forbid, walk out mid-way, it will be noticed and you might face disciplinary action.
Sometimes you're working for a company where face time is important, so you'll have these meetings with the top brass and everyone tries to get an invitation, yet they just sit there doing work with their laptops open throughout. The goal is that the exec sees you and there's a chance he will know your face/name at some point. It's silly but welcome to corporate politics.
> However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.
What about asking to leave the meeting (with polite apologize/explanation)? Meetings converge toward useless when people never say openly that they think they are not needed.
It often starts with a meeting being called with too many people and no clear agenda. If you waste 10 people's time with your meeting, you better have an idea what's so important that it costs 10 man hours.
Which is why excusing yourself openly from that meeting (before or during) makes more sense and is good for company culture in long term.
Frankly, we talk about how important it is for people to be able to speak rudely or express their political opinions in work, but the whole thing oddly stops when it comes to cold calm organizational "I think I don't need to be here".
I'm not sure if you, and the above poster, agree on what it means to be rude. I wouldn't like rudeness at work either, I think what the above commenter meant is more boldness to speak up and say that you want to leave, which should be the norm. Not yelling at someone and then leaving, which would be rude.
Performing work. Not necessarily doing work, but doing the performance of work visibly where it can be seen. That's why senior managers like open plan offices.
If you aren’t aligned with a human need, you’re just going to build a very powerful system to address a very small — or perhaps nonexistent — problem
The problem is we're primarily aligning with the need of the shareholder, not the customer / user. I can't think of a user who requested 24/7 surveillance of their actions in order to receive more targeted ads.
> Someone calls a meeting and 5 people show up, each carrying a laptop
So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes).
If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.
Exactly. I hope my manager sees this article because I die a little inside every time we have to explain something we've already discussed in that meeting or previous ones because he got distracted by his laptop. Sometimes the same thing multiple times in different meetings. Sometimes even in 1:1s (tbf I'm remote so we use webcams).
If you can't pay attention to the answer to the question you just asked or the meeting you scheduled ditch the laptop or close Slack and email. The tiny things you do are picked up on by your staff.
If people bring laptops to the meeting, then they do not need to be there.
If meeting organizer realizes that everyone brought laptops to the meeting, the meeting organizer needs to realize that there was no point in the meeting.
You hit the nail on the head with this one Dave. I'm dealing with this issue with my new team.
My solution was to only bring my Ipad to meetings with me. It does a great job of keeping me constrained to Evernote or jira. Using an Apple Pencil helps me to keep my eyes on the presenter and not drift into multi-task land. If I set a good example, hopefully my team will drop some of the bad habits.
At my company we have weekly all-hands meetings. It lasts about an hour as ~15 people take turns giving updates. I’d say 95% of this meeting is just verbalizing the kanban board. I’d say 80-90% of the meeting isn’t applicable to most attendees except the owner who needs to be aware of everything.
I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.
If people aren't getting value from a meeting, they should stop doing it. Or reflect on why they were doing it in the first place. Talk about it at retrospective! Or sooner! You do have those, right? :-)
I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer.
That's how much I believe in it.
Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..
Maybe you think there is no value, but don't realize the information you or others glean from the meeting pays off. Perhaps think about what value could come from these meetings and then determine whether you are getting it.
The psychological toll of being held to recount and justify my actions of the past 24 hours, every single day, is wholly demoralizing.
I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do?
We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.
In the past few years I have experienced a full spectrum of meeting philosophies. At one point I was required to attend 25 standups per week! I cried mercy and got it reduced to 15. It was still miserable. Mostly I reported that I accomplished nothing since yesterday, and if you really need something done today, see me after 5PM. My current meeting schedule is as follows: a) once a week, 30 minutes with my manager, b) once every two weeks, one hour with my team, c) once a month, 30 minutes with the whole company. Somehow work still gets done without all the meetings. Or wait... work gets done when people are not in meetings! What might be surprising is that in the environment with fewer meetings there is also less chaos, less confusion, fewer mistakes, fewer disasters, and less stress.
I'm not a software engineer, but isn't the idea that if everyone is sharing their progress and challenges then others who had similar challenges on previous projects can voice their suggestions?
It seems like "mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up" is why the meetings seem so pointless, because you aren't listening to other team's challenges and providing input?
Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged, so I don't want to project that onto you, but I always though that was the _idea_ of the daily/weekly standup?
The overall argument against it is that all the information is already reflected in the ticketing system and if anything had to be resolved you can do it 1:1 rather than wasting everyone’s time.
That sort of assumes that you know who to talk to.
I was thinking more about the case of "here's how we are doing it" and someone you wouldn't have thought to ask saying "oh, we tried to do that at [x] last year and it didn't work because [a], [b], [c]".
But then to ensure that that 'right' unknown person is at the meeting you basically have to invite the whole company. Much better to send out a quick "hey, anybody done any work with Monte Carlo simulations before" on the company mailing list.
Maybe twice a year you can have a big 'all-hands' all day work shop where you go through and discuss major long term issues.
isn't the idea that if everyone is sharing their progress and challenges then others who had similar challenges on previous projects can voice their suggestions?
At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.
And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.
Is your employer a software consulting company with teams working for different clients? I could see how in that kind of meeting there would be very little overlap in situational awareness of what each client's requirements are. I was imaging a team working on different parts of the same large product, where it may not be feasible to identify everyone who might be able to provide constructive criticism ahead of time to get them into one of those ad-hoc meetings.
Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.
I was in 50-person all-hands meetings for a product at Google, and there wasn’t the time or the context for anyone to give feedback on anything. At the time I felt bad about my inability to pay attention — without my laptop out I would barely have been able to stay in the room due to boredom — but the meeting really was a poor format and a waste of people’s precious time, attention, and energy, even at an hour a week.
Yep, "oh, we had a problem, but then we fixed it" accounts for about 50% of all the "content" in our daily standups. The solution is almost invariably (a) nontechnical, (b) wholly inapplicable outside some tiny domain, (c) trivial, or (d) so complicated as specific that the speaker rightly elides it from their report, making that 50% of time a total waste for everyone in the room.
The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.
>Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged
Before I moved and started working remotely for my company, I was in one of these meetings where a coworker who took over one of my projects from ~2012 was commenting on what he was doing, and I offered a suggestion in an attempt to help. My immediate supervisor said "That's not important". This is a guy hired all of 4 months before me -- we're #2 and #3 in terms of tenure among developers, and until about 3 years ago both reported directly to the owner of the company.
I then noted that I believed it was important, and I knew that because I had direct experience with the project where my supervisor did not (because I wrote it), and my supervisor asked me "well then why don't fix it instead of [the newer dev working on the project]?" in a dismissive tone. This is a project I hadn't worked on in half a decade and was no longer in my job description.
Thankfully the owner of the company was in the meeting as well, noticed the tension, and talked to both of us separately about it after the meeting (agreeing profusely with me that I was adding a valuable contribution and that my supervisor was out of line to snip at me). The supervisor later apologized to me directly. That was not the first time he directed uninvited hostility toward me, but it was the most public instance of it, and was the last before I started working remotely. Things are much better now, I imagine because the perceived threat of me trying to usurp his managerial role is now 1000 miles away from the office.
So yeah...sometimes these meetings aren't so great, haha.
The problem is that hands-on meetings are supposed to be short, so you'll have time to say "we're having this issue", but not enough time to detail all of the different approaches you've already tried, so you get a lot of less-than-helpful advice from people who don't have enough information to go on but think they do.
That's fair. I suppose the length of the meeting is tough to get right to make it work like that. Too long and you end up wasting time, too short and, like you said, not enough time to get real constructive feedback.
To be asked to pay detailed attention to everyone's diverse problems for a half an hour every single day is an incredible energy drain. I need to focus on my work. If I have to build 20 different mental models in my head once a day to make sense of 20 different people's problems, I can't do that.
The tried-and-true method of, "oh, ask so-and-so, they worked in that area" is strictly better, because no matter how many times you're redirected, you're bothering fewer people than at the daily standup.
In practice it's impossible to help someone with a software development problem in a standup. To understand their problem you almost always need a level of detail that's inappropriate for a standup.
You don't want to force 50 people to sit around waiting while two engineers discuss a problem for 5 minutes. Instead the meeting organizer should say, Sarah, you know about this area, can you connect with Justin after the meeting and see if you can help. Anyone else who has ideas is welcome to join.
Standups only work when people give a quick status update, their plans for the day, and call out any blockers. If it devolves into discussions of how to solve any problem it's no longer a standup. And anyone who schedules standups with more than a single focused team (preferably no more than a dozen people) just doesn't understand what a standup is for.
I just wear wireless headphones and tidy my room during big meetings. It's still easy to pay attention, and takes care of feeling restless during irrelevant parts.
In a sense, being in the conference room is asking people to be (ostensibly) 100% on during the whole meeting, which seems like a huge mental drain.
I love this idea but the four remote people are on a slack video call and projected to the big screen in the conference room. I can't imagine the response if I was seen walking around in the background cleaning stuff up.
We do this every morning at 8am sharp for 30 minutes. I finally just decided not to attend as the inertia from just sitting there was killing my morning productivity.
Exactly, if people start multitasking at meetings giving the meeting their full attention is probably not a good way to spend their time. Trust people to assign their attention as they please and measure results, not hours.
Ironically, many of these managers who find it so difficult to focus on the meetings they're supposed to be leading are are terrible at email as well. Either they flat-out can't write, or mis-use the medium altogether for things that should be handled face-to-face.
Communications technologies can make good people better, but they can also amplify the incompetence of people who owe their current positions to the Peter principle.
If I saw someone with a laptop or their phone, or whatever, sitting in one my meetings not paying full attention to the issue at hand, we'd be having a talk and there'd be a piece of paper with some bad things written on it and you've got a strike.
I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand. If you don't want to pay attention you're probably at the wrong job.
Or people are overlapping discussions without coming to fruition.
Or the current part of the meeting is well known by the person and they are bored.
There are a myriad of reasons why someone check their phones and laptops at meetings. I don't like it, I don't bring my laptop if not strictly needed (I'm presenting something or need to support the presenter), I don't pick my phone up at any time because I feel that is disrespectful.
With that said, I'm dying of boredom in some meetings where the meeting-holder does not have a clue on how to proceed with one, I constantly have to stop people on the third or fourth level deep of an unrelated discussion.
I agree on you having a rule for "no phones, no laptops" but then you have the burden on carrying those meetings optimally, if not you've failed and have no right on asking others to behave if you haven't provided a good environment for that.
Also: I don't like these kind of extreme measures on petty issues, meeting distractions is a solvable problem without the need to shame people, I'd definitely be on the wrong job if that is your stance.
Then you should say, "I'm wasting company time in this meeting." And I'd make sure I'd gotten what I want from you and then let you go if I had it. And I'd appreciate it.
At programmer rates today, it's more than a $1 a minute. That's not petty.
I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand.
If that's actually the case then great. Most of the time I'm asked to a meeting because it's easier for the manager to invite the whole department to one big meeting rather than setting up 6 smaller meetings with only the people needed for each item on the agenda.
I largely agree with Dave, but it's important to think about what you wish the alternative to be. If you ban laptops from meetings, what do you do when people pull their phones out? Are you going to ban phones from meetings too? What about daydreams, are you going to ban those too?
I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.
I really enjoyed reading your response. I think your point can be seen everywhere: commanding desired behaviour never works well, facilitating and encouraging it does.
100% agree with this. I'm working with a new team and our (remote) PM loves scheduling long meetings (60 minutes when we sometimes finish in 20). I'm trying to help him see that we don't need to block out 30 or 60 minutes for a meeting just because those are easiest on Google Calendar.
Probably a cultural thing. I don't see a problem with this. Depending on the meeting, there is no way it will end in 15 or 45 minutes.
If it finishes earlier, great! everybody goes back to work. Sometimes it goes longer, and people have to check if it's being productive, or if they need to gather more info to come back later to subject.
30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.
25 minutes long meeting over slack group can take three hours. You making that meeting so that the issue is solved within 10/20/30 minutes instead of over whole afternoon as people type and take their time to answer.
Whats wrong with any of that? Banning sounds childish but the best fix for someone who is not interested in their work is to fire them, not coddle them. Keeping them around is a net drain on the company. Of course if you're biased towards the employer always being in the wrong, then you might feel differently. At some point, you can't tell someone they're doing it wrong if what they're doing works for them and they're producing results.
I don't feel inspired by my manager/team so I'm going to doze off at my desk, and My employees are over-paid lazy sacks of s* are two sides of the same coin.
I wonder what kind of organisation other people are working in.
We do 30~60 minute meetings that are reasonably done well, people are impacted by what is discussed.
But honestly it’s nothing so difficult or riveting that needs everyone to focus like crazy for an hour straight.
Then people talk slowly, have to explain details that half of the room knows but not the other one. People ask questions that you might not care about but the rest of the people do, and you won’t stand up and go away just for a 5 min question.
Then focusing 100% of our intention doesn’t shorten the meeting. We tried, and it wasn’t more efficient in any significant way (who cares for 10min gained for 50 min of full focus?). Instead people would just skip meetings altogether, because the balance between the info to share and one hour of their time was almost always in favor of their time, and dreaded to no end mandatory meetings.
ROTI scores were horrible while never improving.
I do think it's a good idea to ban phones & laptops when possible (sometimes they're need for presenting, note-taking, etc). Daydreams really aren't comparable to the other things we're talking about.
I agree it's important for meetings to be concise and focused on issues that are relevant to the attendees. However, I don't think the presenter should have to be flashy. If someone has their phone/laptop out, they might not even give the presenter the initial few minutes of attention it takes to get engaged with the topic.
Also, I'm in favor of banning devices at meetings because IME it leads to improvements in the meeting structure. If there's a long, boring meeting I might be relatively OK with it if I can spend the time doing something else on my laptop. If the only option is to pay attention to the useless meeting, however, then I'm more likely to provide suggestions and pressure to make the meeting better.
If people in meetings need dopamine hits every 30 seconds to avoid falling asleep then they probably have a lower performing brain because of chronic sleep deprivation.
Most people are sleep deprived, and if they can't focus for a 30 second meeting then they should head to the nap room.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 180 ms ] threadI've been in countless meetings where it's been unclear why y presence was required.
Simple examples:
In a one-on-one meeting, you're not going to open your laptop. You have to hold up your end.
In a meeting in which you know you will be answering questions, you'll be paying attention.
In a meeting which is about your work and decisions will be made, you pay attention.
Then again, in a meeting which is about work you care about, you pay attention.
Now the antitheses: if the meeting has many attendees, and you don't need to answer questions, and decisions about your work aren't being made... why are you even there? In fact, why are most people there? Is it a group bonding activity? That's a legitimate thing, but it should be fairly infrequent.
Sometimes that one participant crowds out the voices of others so no one bothers to speak up... The leader of the meeting needs to be confident enough to interrupt the person taking more than their fair share of time and then try to get participation from others in the group. Being wholly ready to cut off the aggressive personality that wants to constantly talk or repeat the same thing(s) over and over.
Or situations where ones input is only valuable for a limited period of time or around a certain subject matter.
If it’s an hour long meeting and management or project managers have organised it - chances are I’ll have my laptop with me and I’ll be getting things done.
Of course I don’t turn up with my laptop open, not only would that be rude it would also be presumptuous as to the quality of the meeting.
However, if the content of that meeting turns out to be fluff - I’ll be working on being productive rather than watching slides of information that could have been emailed.
Otherwise, you should politely ask if you are still needed, wait for the "no", and only then leave.
Among others, this avoids awkward situations where you are needed 5 minutes later, and people have to wait for you to come back. In that case, your behaviour would be (rightfully) perceived as passive-aggressive rather than constructive.
Pretty much hit the nail on the head. So much passive aggression, frustration, and abrasiveness injected into the work environment just because people don't have the face to say "Hey guys, if theres nothing else for me/for me to add here im going to drop off the call/go back to my desk."
I do this in about 30% of the meetings im in, probably twice in 5 years someones said they'd actually like me for something they were going to lead onto, and both times it was genuine.
Also, if you run a meeting, and you move onto something that doesnt need all parties, you can just say "So we're going to move onto X, you guys might not be so interested in so feel free to leave, unless of course you want to stay"
Never any hard feelings either way. It just business.
Sometimes the meeting has no clear agenda, and it's unknown whether you will be needed to contribute. Since you're peripherally involved with the project you're invited. The conversation may flow to some topic you need to weigh in on. These are bad meetings of course but they happen.
Sometimes you're simply expected to be present at a meeting even though you have nothing to contribute and there's nothing to take away that won't be in the e-mailed meeting notes. Your silent attendance is what's important, not whether you're engaged. In these cases, if you don't show up or heaven forbid, walk out mid-way, it will be noticed and you might face disciplinary action.
Sometimes you're working for a company where face time is important, so you'll have these meetings with the top brass and everyone tries to get an invitation, yet they just sit there doing work with their laptops open throughout. The goal is that the exec sees you and there's a chance he will know your face/name at some point. It's silly but welcome to corporate politics.
What about asking to leave the meeting (with polite apologize/explanation)? Meetings converge toward useless when people never say openly that they think they are not needed.
Frankly, we talk about how important it is for people to be able to speak rudely or express their political opinions in work, but the whole thing oddly stops when it comes to cold calm organizational "I think I don't need to be here".
Do the managers never pick-up on these subtle clues that, maybe, the people in their meetings are not taking them seriously?
The problem is we're primarily aligning with the need of the shareholder, not the customer / user. I can't think of a user who requested 24/7 surveillance of their actions in order to receive more targeted ads.
So ban laptops from meetings (aside from the person taking the minutes).
If a meeting requires my undivided attention, my laptop is going to be useless anyway. If it does not require my undivided attention, I shouldn't be in that meeting in the first place.
If you can't pay attention to the answer to the question you just asked or the meeting you scheduled ditch the laptop or close Slack and email. The tiny things you do are picked up on by your staff.
If meeting organizer realizes that everyone brought laptops to the meeting, the meeting organizer needs to realize that there was no point in the meeting.
My solution was to only bring my Ipad to meetings with me. It does a great job of keeping me constrained to Evernote or jira. Using an Apple Pencil helps me to keep my eyes on the presenter and not drift into multi-task land. If I set a good example, hopefully my team will drop some of the bad habits.
I work remote so I attend via a slack call. I just mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up. The on-site folks have to just sit at the conference table.
(20-minute daily "standup" of 10 people following the format you describe, in addition to once-weekly 30-person status meeting. It's absurd.)
I once quit a job and when my boss asked why I was quitting it was the lack of retrospectives. The following week we had a retrospective, and I stuck around for a while longer.
That's how much I believe in it.
Of course, that company went from upstart to dominating its market in 5 years. Who knows if the fact that the whole company started constantly tuning its process helped? I'd like to think it did..
I'm working on the same god-damn thing I was the day before, and the day before that. Everyone knows that, and they can look at Jira if they forget. If they need me to unblock them, they can walk over to me. (It's a fucking open office, so it's not like I can hide.) If they don't know they need me to unblock them, e-mail exists. I don't feel a need to share each trial and success of my past 24h, but maybe some people do?
We're adults. If we can't be trusted to focus on work or take initiative to solve our own problems, management should reconsider their hiring strategy.
It seems like "mute my mic and keep working until my department comes up" is why the meetings seem so pointless, because you aren't listening to other team's challenges and providing input?
Then again, I could be romanticizing these meetings and maybe at your company unsolicited feedback is discouraged, so I don't want to project that onto you, but I always though that was the _idea_ of the daily/weekly standup?
I was thinking more about the case of "here's how we are doing it" and someone you wouldn't have thought to ask saying "oh, we tried to do that at [x] last year and it didn't work because [a], [b], [c]".
Maybe twice a year you can have a big 'all-hands' all day work shop where you go through and discuss major long term issues.
At least in my experience, 90% of the time there aren't any 'useful' challenges being presented. Mostly it's stuff like "Dave was sick last week so we're a bit behind", "ticket #447 was much trickier than we expected, but we've solved it now" or "We're still waiting for the client to send us the updated data files". The actual technical challenges are almost always hashed out in smaller ad hoc meetings among the relevant people. And even when a 'real' challenge does get aired it's often of such a specialized nature that only 2-3 people have anything useful to add and it's much better for them to have a separate meeting. So it's not that feedback is discouraged, it's that there is hardly anything at the meeting to give constructive feedback on, and any feedback I can give has already been given days ago in one those above mentioned ad hoc meetings.
And in the very very rare event that someone has a challenge that is big enough and generic enough that it's reasonable to assume that the whole team will have something productive to add then that is a unique enough event that it's worth scheduling a specific meeting just for that.
Although, "that's the idea but it doesn't work in practice" is a fine answer, too.
The few cases when it's actually a common problem one could reasonably expect others to have, team-wide emails have already been sent and there's no need to cover it again.
Before I moved and started working remotely for my company, I was in one of these meetings where a coworker who took over one of my projects from ~2012 was commenting on what he was doing, and I offered a suggestion in an attempt to help. My immediate supervisor said "That's not important". This is a guy hired all of 4 months before me -- we're #2 and #3 in terms of tenure among developers, and until about 3 years ago both reported directly to the owner of the company.
I then noted that I believed it was important, and I knew that because I had direct experience with the project where my supervisor did not (because I wrote it), and my supervisor asked me "well then why don't fix it instead of [the newer dev working on the project]?" in a dismissive tone. This is a project I hadn't worked on in half a decade and was no longer in my job description.
Thankfully the owner of the company was in the meeting as well, noticed the tension, and talked to both of us separately about it after the meeting (agreeing profusely with me that I was adding a valuable contribution and that my supervisor was out of line to snip at me). The supervisor later apologized to me directly. That was not the first time he directed uninvited hostility toward me, but it was the most public instance of it, and was the last before I started working remotely. Things are much better now, I imagine because the perceived threat of me trying to usurp his managerial role is now 1000 miles away from the office.
So yeah...sometimes these meetings aren't so great, haha.
The tried-and-true method of, "oh, ask so-and-so, they worked in that area" is strictly better, because no matter how many times you're redirected, you're bothering fewer people than at the daily standup.
You don't want to force 50 people to sit around waiting while two engineers discuss a problem for 5 minutes. Instead the meeting organizer should say, Sarah, you know about this area, can you connect with Justin after the meeting and see if you can help. Anyone else who has ideas is welcome to join.
Standups only work when people give a quick status update, their plans for the day, and call out any blockers. If it devolves into discussions of how to solve any problem it's no longer a standup. And anyone who schedules standups with more than a single focused team (preferably no more than a dozen people) just doesn't understand what a standup is for.
In a sense, being in the conference room is asking people to be (ostensibly) 100% on during the whole meeting, which seems like a huge mental drain.
Communications technologies can make good people better, but they can also amplify the incompetence of people who owe their current positions to the Peter principle.
I asked you to the meeting cause I wanted your full metal capacity on the issue at hand. If you don't want to pay attention you're probably at the wrong job.
Or people are overlapping discussions without coming to fruition.
Or the current part of the meeting is well known by the person and they are bored.
There are a myriad of reasons why someone check their phones and laptops at meetings. I don't like it, I don't bring my laptop if not strictly needed (I'm presenting something or need to support the presenter), I don't pick my phone up at any time because I feel that is disrespectful.
With that said, I'm dying of boredom in some meetings where the meeting-holder does not have a clue on how to proceed with one, I constantly have to stop people on the third or fourth level deep of an unrelated discussion.
I agree on you having a rule for "no phones, no laptops" but then you have the burden on carrying those meetings optimally, if not you've failed and have no right on asking others to behave if you haven't provided a good environment for that.
Also: I don't like these kind of extreme measures on petty issues, meeting distractions is a solvable problem without the need to shame people, I'd definitely be on the wrong job if that is your stance.
At programmer rates today, it's more than a $1 a minute. That's not petty.
If that's actually the case then great. Most of the time I'm asked to a meeting because it's easier for the manager to invite the whole department to one big meeting rather than setting up 6 smaller meetings with only the people needed for each item on the agenda.
Do you always circulate a followup after the meeting with all decisions made, and the persons responsible for implementing those decisions?
I remember being in a military course where we were getting very little sleep, and naturally, there were no personal laptops and personal phones were banned. If people started to nod off from the lack of sleep, they were called out and asked to stand up to keep from falling asleep. Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
Sure, it's important to make sure people are focused in meetings. But the way to do that isn't just by setting a positive example, but by increasing the focus of the meeting: reducing the number of invitees to only those who are really necessary, having a scheduling framework for who is expected to talk about what and for how long, and making sure that everybody in the meeting is focused on producing, together, the documentation (e.g. a record of the decision made) which is the product of that meeting. People are a lot less likely to "slack off" in meetings if they feel like their presence is necessary, appreciated, and productive.
30 minutes seems ok for a meeting. Lower than that, maybe you don't even need a meeting. Just some chat in a slack group.
My employer does this, and it's wonderful.
> Does anybody really want to work in that kind of environment where their attention is not invited, but commanded?
No, but nobody is making that argument.
That is, these are good questions, but are they intended as road blocks? Each one can be easily answered and you can always change your answer.
I don't feel inspired by my manager/team so I'm going to doze off at my desk, and My employees are over-paid lazy sacks of s* are two sides of the same coin.
We do 30~60 minute meetings that are reasonably done well, people are impacted by what is discussed.
But honestly it’s nothing so difficult or riveting that needs everyone to focus like crazy for an hour straight.
Then people talk slowly, have to explain details that half of the room knows but not the other one. People ask questions that you might not care about but the rest of the people do, and you won’t stand up and go away just for a 5 min question.
Then focusing 100% of our intention doesn’t shorten the meeting. We tried, and it wasn’t more efficient in any significant way (who cares for 10min gained for 50 min of full focus?). Instead people would just skip meetings altogether, because the balance between the info to share and one hour of their time was almost always in favor of their time, and dreaded to no end mandatory meetings. ROTI scores were horrible while never improving.
We just had to stop.
I agree it's important for meetings to be concise and focused on issues that are relevant to the attendees. However, I don't think the presenter should have to be flashy. If someone has their phone/laptop out, they might not even give the presenter the initial few minutes of attention it takes to get engaged with the topic.
Also, I'm in favor of banning devices at meetings because IME it leads to improvements in the meeting structure. If there's a long, boring meeting I might be relatively OK with it if I can spend the time doing something else on my laptop. If the only option is to pay attention to the useless meeting, however, then I'm more likely to provide suggestions and pressure to make the meeting better.
Most people are sleep deprived, and if they can't focus for a 30 second meeting then they should head to the nap room.
Banning phones and laptops means that everyone in the meeting is either invested in it or motivated not to get invited to the next one.