Ask HN: How do you run better meetings?
The pandemic made more meetings necessary. Besides zoom fatigue there has been a lot of frustration by different team members that often meetings are not necessary, they could have been avoided with a briefing or people just join because they are afraid that they miss information if they don't. How do you handle meeting feedback for meetings by others to make sure it is not just a random meeting with talking, no agenda, no clear outcomes and mainly information sharing? How do you make your own meetings as efficient as possible?
73 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadMy tip: Don't even start the meeting unless you know the criteria for ending it. Most people just run out the clock or try and use the time for something else -- deny them this.
If you have to run meetings, consider the option to temporarily institute an approval process by senior management whereby the thesis for any meeting (proposed agenda, attendees, etc.) is first proposed in private. Then senior management has the opportunity to ask questions and give feedback. This alone will force those convening to think twice. If necessary, quantify the cost of the meeting as attendees × (time + loss of focus).
Scheduling-wise, optimize meetings for less productive periods (late afternoon, first thing in the morning pre-coffee, right after lunch, etc.).
Anonymous feedback. Let participants share feedback so they can explain what they liked/didn't like about the format, agenda, hosting and 'other' (always have an other option on surveys!) without appearing quarrelsome to others.
Use the Amazon approach: https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/jeff-bezos-knows-how-to-ru...
How do you use anonymous feedback? We do not have any tools in place for this but I do like the idea.
Use an auto-transcription service. If presence is required, try to get a real time system going and flag keywords. That way you can alternate task your way to the important bits without dedicated mental bandwidth. The nice thing about this is you just need the system audio feed, muted, as the input which by definition works with all conferencing platforms.
Also, if you do go for an external tool, there's now someone outside your organisation with a recording and transcript of every meeting you've used this for... That's a potential goldmine - not the kind of company you want you see acquired or merging in the future.
Maybe people's expectations will change due to so many online meetings, but under normal circumstances, I can't imagine many legal teams would want the risk of a third party transcription tool listening in.
We dealt with this in the zoom era by having some people present but not paying attention. They would join the meeting but then turn the sound off and do their own thing. If we needed their input on something, then we would ping them on slack and they would come in and provide their input. In GCal, marking people as "optionally" attending meant that they were free to not pay attention.
> 2. I join to make sure I do not miss the critical pieces of information that I need. That is often five minutes out of sixty minutes.
We made a rule that every meeting had to have an agenda list posted to slack before the meeting and a summary posted to slack after the meeting. The meeting convener was responsible for making sure this happened but could delegate this responsibility to someone else. Often, this was a good onboarding task for new members joining the team.
I'd assume that other communication is done semi-formally, e.g. a slack group or call. Updates are asynchronous, someone does an update and the the whole group knows. Anything where you have to block out 2 hours of everyone's time should be approved.
As much as I dislike pointless meetings, this approach would not work in my workplace. Senior management would view this as a request to be babysat. Employees are all expected to host and attend meetings, and everyone is responsible for the value of this time|work.
Meetings come in all shapes and sizes.
I far prefer to let people self-organise and foster that culture plus weekly or bi-weekly 1-1s. Nothing is anonymous in an organisation.. you can recognise people by terms, grammar. Then.. having people do a survey on a meeting, every meeting?, is squaring the problem so.. a 1 hour meeting of 10 people, 10 hours, results in 2 minutes feedback time per person, 20 additional minutes, plus associated time to rant about someone else i.e. one's self, and then to deal with that passive-aggressive rant rather than sticking this emotional response into the 1-1 when someone's had time to reflect.
Madness.
Wait, you just mentioned all times. I'm most productive late in the afternoon. Not everyone is the same.
The problem is that unless everyone works exactly the same hours, that's almost all the times - you basically have to have all your meetings at 10 or 2.
On the specifics of the meetings I've implemented 2 things:
1) Offer no-video meetings, maybe for 1:1 if you don't need to screen share. Be the first to go on a walk or be away from keyboard, to encourage others (especially new team members) to do it as well. Clearly I'm not sayin ALL 1:1, face time also has value, use your judgement.
2) Include a bit of non-working life. The way we were running our weekly sync was talk quickly about what you did/didn't last week (especially to catch blockers), share what's your plan for this coming week, share something you did during the weekend. 8-10 people, 30min.
2. Make sure the agenda includes specific desired outcomes (e.g. We will decide on the scope for release x and choose what gets dropped,)
3. Keep meetings short. Likely, you’ll only need more than 30 minutes to discuss and make a decision. If you regularly need longer than that, you probably have too many invitees.
Basically make sure there’s a very clear goal for the meeting and very clear bounds on what is being discussed.
For me, I put an agenda in every meeting invite I send out with:
1. The purpose of the meeting
2. Bullet points on the things to consider
3. The end goal. What is the point we stop discussing
Part of it is also keeping people talking about relevant things.
It’s tough being the person who says “this is a great line of thinking but it’s not relevant to X” but in the end it helps make timeboxed meetings actually stay timeboxed.
Also, depending on the context, often it’s helpful to pre-align with a few key people who might cause potential struggle. Don’t pre-align with another meeting though. That’s just redundant.
I can't stand meetings with no purpose/agenda/end goals. In my experience they grind decision making to a halt, increase interoffice politics/shenanigangs, and we end up building worse things because we have spent so much time in worthless meetings/debating about worthless meetings that we don't have time to actually build a good solution.
It really starts at the top. If stakeholders are pushing points 1, 2, 3, then the incentives organizationally are going to change and you'll end up with productive meetings as an outcome. If they're the type that are, "The agenda is in the meeting title! (Q2 sales checkin)" Then you'll always get unsatisfactory results.
Have a agenda. Contribute to steering conversations into completing the agenda, once done, finish the meeting. Write down notes of everything, publish to team members / everyone in the company. Try to have less meetings and more focused ones to complete specific goals. Everyone who is in the meeting should have a purpose for being there, otherwise they shouldn't be there but still can see meeting notes if they want to.
Send said agenda to everyone preferably the day before the meeting.
Also make the meeting small enough that everyone can be asked to engage with said agenda.
Here's what I do:
1) separate technical meetings from process/operations meetings and clearly spell out the difference
2) Write in a narrative format what it is you're trying to accomplish and distribute this ahead of time. Doesn't have to be the often lauded "Amazon 6-pager", but if you can't explain what it is you're trying to accomplish in words you need to think about it a little more.
3) do not be afraid to throw someone else's name down as the owner for a specific action (but make sure to follow up if they aren't/can't be present)
4) Designate primary and alternate owners for actions, and make it clear when you need the primary and when the alternate will suffice. This helps with a) meeting fatigue and b) the increase in volume of meetings caused by no more water cooler talk.
5) do not take critical feedback about meeting structure personally. This one was hard for me at first, since I'm used to more formal structures, but there is no "pure best practice" for meetings - especially in a WFH environment. It's an iterative process.
For 5) I feel it is hard. Often there are expectations that you join meetings just in case a higher-up manager needs a piece of information or I am afraid to loose out on critical information. Do you, in your organization, have an active meeting culture with feedback for meetings? It feels to me that in my organization too often when a conflict, next steps or any other decision is needed, instead of writing about it people just schedule meetings to discuss things. And then there are meetings where people just share information ("team meetings") that could be shared in writing much more efficiently (people read faster than others talk, so reading information is often more efficient from my point of view).
If English is not your first language, then this advice is doubly important because it will help you improve.
Edit: sorry, I didn't actually answer your question.
>Do you, in your organization, have an active meeting culture with feedback for meetings?
Yes, but I'm a little more senior now and I think focusing on the feedback mechanism itself is missing the forest for the trees. Communication is always King, wherever you go. It seems like, from your description of the situation, you have a great opportunity to improve the communication within your organization overall, if people are still reverting to "just schedule a meeting".
- Be ruthless about when you need to have a meeting. Its generally only if you need three or more decision-makers to come to a consensus on a strategy to solve some problem.
- Be ruthless about who you invite; it's usually only people who have something explicitly to contribute or who you know wish to be included.
- One person leading/driving the discussion, making sure to keep things on topic and within timeframes.
- A clearly defined agenda and goal, ideally written up in the invite message.
- Take very brief notes of decisions made and immediate actions, conclude with a rundown of these and follow up with them by email.
Too often I’ve attended meetings that might have well never happened because whatever got discussed was forgotten a month later and another meeting was held to discuss the same thing.
- Check-in: Give each attendee 10-30s to just say how they're feeling, either in general or about the topic. This can do a lot to make individuals more likely to engage in the meeting, but also to help you assess the mindset of those attending and anticipate issues.
- Framing: Beyond having a defined agenda and goal, it is also important to establish some 'rules' early on. For example "If I feel we are off agenda, I will interrupt and ask that we freeze the discussion until the end of the meeting, if we have time left".
- Check-out: It is important that you don't equate silence to mean acceptance. Sometimes people will disagree with the results but refrain from raising the point as they feel alienated in the meeting or don't want to 'open it back up'. By asking people to each explicitly state if they're happy with the meeting results or if they feel some tension, you can get hints at where these issues may be.
These points may seem soft, but they are honestly incredibly valuable I find. They've saved me a lot of time with a few people who would otherwise stay silent then send me a 'derailing' email a week or two later.
I think one thing that is missing in the Slack/no meeting discussions is that you can resolve things just as poorly (or worse!) via email/Slack/Teams. Effective communication is really really hard and requires significant effort.
- create a culture of actually RSVP'ing for meetings (yes or no!) so that people know who will be in a call and you don't waste 5 minutes wondering if X will be joining or if anyone will be joining at all. Pairs best with a culture of actually being on time for meetings and ending on time (so you can all be on time for the next one).
- to facilitate this, if you have a good agenda, people can opt out of coming if there are no relevant topics, or in some cases they can share their feedback on to a colleague or the organizer who will pass it on to the group on their behalf. As a result of this process, some of our "best" (from today's point of view; they used to be the worst in terms of getting through the agenda or understanding if this instance will be relevant to you) meetings have morphed into an actual commitment to have every participant spending 5-10 min to write down status updates in advance, with 2 minute actual "live meeting" check-ins: "anything besides the notes we all left for eachother, to discuss?"
This second one has been especially effective for our distributed management team in very different timezones where "overlap" meeting times (usually beginning-of-day-US/end-of-day-EU) are at a premium. You can do a few of those ("whole product team + stakeholders" "whole back-end dev team" "all engineering managers") meetings in one traditional-meeting time slot if you keep the agenda razor focused.
By one measure it's "more work" - if you think about the time that each person spends creating their content in advance, vs what they could spend wall clock time talking in the meeting - 30 min meeting can only have thirty minutes of talking - vs N x 10min pre-writing. It's just parallelizable outside of the tiny synchronous need as the mutex is passed, and a better use of everyone's time - you can write the status update any time before the meeting, whenever you have downtime.
Effective meetings are hard. I struggle moderating them constantly. Here’s what I learnt:
- Be clear about the purpose of the meeting - is it knowledge sharing, is it to kick people’s butts to progress towards a goal, is it to build camaraderie, etc. Information sharing can be much looser in structure, a project meeting needs to be run with a more tight agenda. A social meeting should be relaxed and have avenues to break the ice
- Always keep meeting minutes (unless it’s a social focused meeting) and write down who will do what afterwards (and follow up on those points). Even if the first few times it’s unsuccessful, eventually it will improve overall discipline. However sometimes it’s an uphill battle that can’t be won - imperfection is okay, people are lazy and won’t do everything they agreed to do in a time manner. Just push them in the right direction
- Focus on the important things, make sure they are covered off in the meeting. Thus, meeting prep is vital - plan the interactions as much as possible in your head and write the goal you want to achieve from the meeting
- Don’t hold unnecessary meetings. Respect people’s time as much as possible
- Practice makes perfect. There are so many combinations of types of meetings that you just need to develop a feel for them
- Try and understand the personalities of who is attending. This will give you strategies to make the meeting more effective. For example a decision maker who never replies to emails and takes too long to make a decision - you want to pin them down in the meeting and gently pressure them to come to a conclusion, because once the meeting is over, they will spend another week procrastinating! Others like to work together and chat more, for them, meetings help give energy to move towards common goals. Others are less social and want to focus on doing work, those meetings should be much more concise and direct
Hope that helps
Two quick frameworks that you might find helpful:
1) The POST method, to give clarity at the beginning of a meeting: Purpose: What is the purpose of the meeting? Objective: What are you trying to achieve in the meeting, and what does success look like? Structure: What is the structure of the meeting we are having? Timing: How much time is allocated to the meeting?
https://gist.github.com/aaronbuchanan/2dcf936daceab925da61
I like this because it helps give quick context, also the mnemonic is quite handy.
2) Try to structure your meeting around other people's questions: - Going from basic what questions working up to why we need to make a decision, how they might be impacted etc. - I wrote a short post about it here: https://www.logikblok.com/supporting-asking-questions
I like this because it focuses your communication around your audience/user needs.
Aside from that and keeping everyone on the same track of discussion / time / documenting agreements all help out. Hope that helps.
If you call in a meeting:
- Have a clear picture of what you try to achieve with it.
- Communicate the purpose of the meeting in advance.
- Moderate the meeting to make sure that its participants actively contribute towards its goal. That is, if the meeting digresses, politely address it and make a constructive proposal on when and how to address the topic that caused the digression.
If you are being called into a meeting:
- Ask for what you can contribute to the goal of the meeting if it is not clear.
- Take responsibility in working towards the goal of the meeting.
This is hard work and I'm having enough Zoom fatigue so that I do not follow these guidelines myself at times but I try. I'm curious what others bring up.
I've never been in a meeting that I consider productive. I've never been in a meeting that, in my opinion, couldn't have been done better with at least 90% of the time spent in the meeting completed by reviewing materials before the meeting and then signing off on them. Even that 10% could have been done with even an email / forum thread.
TLDR
* Have an agenda * Aggressively manage time * Make sure that people engage in the way that you need them to * Stop telling jokes
Easy. (Or at least easier said than done.) Only initiate/attend a meeting if one or more of these things are clearly defined before the meeting even takes place. It can be helpful to approach it like you would a ticket or a to-do at work: identify what the completion criteria is and timebox it, then assign it out or invite people to it who are needed for its success.
Another thing to keep in mind is the hierarchy of your organization. This can reduce the chances of inviting too many or the wrong people. For instance, if a product manager wants to meet about a small upcoming project, they probably don't have to invite the entire development team. Rather, they should invite the lead and have the lead forward the invitation to whoever might be working on it within the dev team.
If I'm understanding the situation correctly, if the company is large and spread far apart, an employee should be able to reach out to the leads of other teams, explain what it is that they hope to accomplish with the meeting, and ask the leads to invite anyone else who may either contribute to it or get something out of it. That said, even just pinging those people ahead of time with the question of "do we need to have a meeting about this? / Would this meeting be useful?" can go a long way in either refining the agenda or cancelling the meeting altogether. Depending on the organization, of course.
Meetings shouldn't be the way to communicate information, it should be done to make decision or to socialize. Emails are the way to communicate information much more effectively. Have people take meeting notes and email it at least.
Many meetings are used to simply coordinate activity. This can easily be done through asynchronous communication using email or instant messaging.
Usually there's a reason, but often it's just cause a question might come up that I can answer or similar. In those cases I'll let them know they can poke me if they really need me and then I'll join for whatever they need.
Thankfully my boss has understood that the less he's in our way the more we get done, so this works well.
My boss is fantastic at this. I feel sorry for him, but also highly respect him. He goes into a stupid, pointless, hour-long meeting where only 3 minutes of content is relevant to us. Of course our entire team was invited and nominally expected to attend. He pushes back saying we're busy. He comes back and relays those 3 minutes of important content while suffering through 57 minutes of droll.
Conversely, being “meeting first” demands everyone’s attention. Even for small scale projects I’d rather hop on a 5 minute call then get into it over slack.
0.) Prevent meetings whenever possible
0.) Don't do meetings longer than 2 hours, better 1 hour
0.) Invite only people, that have to be there
1.) Set a topic and max. 3 goals per hour BEFORE inviting
2.) Prepare yourself BEFORE the meeting
3.) Repeat the goals visually at the beginning (on a board)
4.) Focus on the goals
5.) At halftime, revalidate the achieved goals
6.) Take the last 5-10 minutes to verify, the goals have been achieved
7.) Don't exceed the time limit (not even 5 minutes)
8.) If you finish earlier, leave the room earlier! (Don't talk about something else, because you are all there)
9.) Write an email with a SHORT summary to everyone, who may care
So, ask:
Did everyone in the meeting contribute or learn something they couldn't learn by reading?
If the answer is 'no', there were too many people in the meeting or it should not have happened at all.
I've been in so many hour long meetings with 6-8 developers plus project manager, supervisor, and maybe one related person and at least 6 of the devs say nothing. That's 6 hours of dev time lit on fire each time.
The best meetings tend to be ones where stakeholders can share information and come to a decision that pushes a project forward or where there is valuable training or a useful presentation.
Also, if your meeting ever includes the phrase "well, we've got 20 minutes left so let's take some time to discuss <this thing unrelated to the meeting>", it was a terrible horrible no good bad meeting.
Depends on your org, but I bet some of those developers wish they were back at their desks working, because it's a waste of time for them. The reason they're probably there is because they feel it would look bad for them if they were absent.
1. Are you having a meeting because somebody is looking for information?
Do not have a meeting. Write shit down. There is e-mail and Slack and MS Teams and Google Docs and Sharepoint and Confluence and a billion ways to write shit down that does not require a meeting. Always make an attempt to gather information before you have a meeting, because you might get to the meeting and find out you have go to find out information somewhere else anyway.
Document where people should write shit down and where to go find information. Force people to write shit down by making it a requirement to do something. Make the process of finding or writing shit painless, easy, useful, and transparent (no hidden folders, secret channels, locked down access, obscure systems, etc). This is more difficult than it sounds, but the benefits are huge.
2. Are you having a meeting to decide something?
Before the meeting, if you think you're going to run over the meeting time, make the meeting longer, or realize that your meeting's scope is too big, or that you haven't gathered the information needed to make the decision. Also write down what you're going to talk about / decide, who is required to attend (& why), what/where the supporting information is, what the potential decision choices are. During the meeting, write down feedback. At the end of the meeting, write up what was decided. End the meeting as soon as you achieve the meeting's objective. Reply to all the attendees with the meeting notes (or a link to the meeting notes). Write all this down on a page titled "Meeting Checklist".
Tell your coworkers to include the Meeting Checklist in the meeting request. Make an e-mail filter to send all meeting requests without the checklist to the trash. Ask your boss to back you up on this.
People will bitch and complain about this because they'd rather interrupt 20 people for an hour than do a bunch of annoying preparation. Tell them that they have 2 alternatives: 1) don't have a meeting and figure it out offline, or 2) if it's an emergency, they can schedule a meeting without the checklist, if they include "EMERGENCY" in the subject of the meeting.
3. Do people just need an outlet for social interaction?
"social hours" / "office hours" can be a good way for people to talk without a meeting. Schedule these at either the beginning or end of the day (or both). This way people don't have to chit-chat in meetings because they know they can do it another time.
4. Do you still have too many meetings?
Schedule meeting-free days. I suggest two per week, because people break these and schedule meetings anyway. Block off your calendar all day.
Fight zoom fatigue. Require all meetings end 5 minutes early for every 30 minutes. So, 25 minutes for a 30 min meeting, 50 minutes for an hour meeting. Start the clock at the beginning of the meeting, don't wait 5 minutes for people to join. (Mention this in the meeting invite)
Have your whole team agree to block off their lunch time. Meeting flex time is nice, but not when it prevents people from eating and resting. This can be on an individual basis or group basis, but everybody's calendar should have a 1 hour block sometime during the day.
Have your team decide on a maximum number of meeting hours per day. Once your calendar has hit the max, start rejecting meetings, or cancel less important meetings. If your whole day is meetings, you better be a manager with 30 direct reports or something.
* Send out the meeting invite 3-7 days ahead of time, including full reasoning for the meeting, and a link to the agenda in a shared editor
* Only hold the meeting if you weren't able to work it out async in the time leading up to the scheduled meeting
Sometimes avoiding a meeting is incentive enough to coordinate the work async ahead of time. But if the meeting still happens, you’ll have a well prepared thought out agenda, and all participants will have had time to prepare as well. So your meeting becomes a matter of working through any remaining unresolved topics/details from the shared agenda.