>agenda

I once worked at a company that had something like 3 to 5k employees. Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings. Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite.

I loved this, it made for FAR more productive meetings.

Nobody at the company that I knew of outside myself and one other person had agendas available for our meetings, including leadership.

I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership, and most top leaders make themselves exceptions to every rule and that lack of meeting discipline trickles down and so meetings break down overall.

Agenda + minutes, in however minimal a form, is crucial. A meeting with no minutes and no agenda and a warm drink is just a tea party. Not that that doesn't have a role in organizations, but it shouldn't dominate your time.

Most standups are therefore tea parties. A previous boss of mine even used to bring biscuits, which was nice. It serves the role of reminding everyone that each other exists and are collaborating as a team, which occasionally needs reinforcement.

It's an RAF forums in-joke that being invited to a "meeting without biscuits" means you are going to be reprimanded.

Edit: good comment in this thread on the role of middle management meetings being intrinsically social/political: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44708660

First, a meeting is primarily not a way to spread knowledge. Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories (which are surprisingly untrustworthy over even tiny time scales). For example; written text. The greatest benefit of text is that it can be asynchronously consumed, multiple times. Meetings are primarily for two things:

I think this makes sense in the abstract but not always in practice. I have been in many long back-and-forth Slack conversations explaining some piece of knowledge that would be better as a 20 minute meeting.

And so I think a better "mental model" of meetings might be functionally the same as human communication in general: for smaller and faster-acting groups, live communication (meetings) is often more efficient than writing. Especially when the team is small and needs to act quickly, because then the time cost of 5-20% of your manpower spending an hour to write out something that takes 10 minutes to explain via a video meeting walkthrough is not optimal.

But the more people your group has, the more you'll need to shift to a text-based communication method.

(This is also why I think remote work makes sense in many contexts, but does somewhat become less efficient in smaller, fast-moving companies. Unless you replace the in-person ad hoc meeting with a rapid on-demand meeting culture, you'll have some inefficiencies and move slower.)

I have seen some attempts to use AI transcription bots as an attempt to square the circle here and commit ephemeral meeting information into durable text information, and in general they aren't too bad actually.

I have two separate points to add to this. Point 1. During the pandemic, I learned that meetings also support team cohesion. We experimented with less meetings, but quickly got to a point where we restored at least _some_ meetings to ensure we'd stay functional as a team. This still matters given that we're still working from home 60-80% of the time.

Point 2. The meeting host needs to be able to answer the following questions for every invitee, and in turn, every invitee needs to know the answer to the following questions: 1) What is it that this person can _contribute to_ the meeting? 2) What is it that this person can _learn from_ the meeting?

With these two questions in mind, everything else becomes less important. For example, if everyone is clear about these two things, the meeting doesn't even need a description (or the other way around: if the answers to these questions are unclear, the meeting description can help answer them)

Working on reading this, the first thing that struck me was that it reflects something that started ~15 years ago at Best Buy.

https://slate.com/business/2014/05/best-buys-rowe-experiment...

"Results-Only Work Environment" (ROWE) encapsulated treating employees as responsible adults, and letting them make decisions about what they needed to do to get work done, including declining any meetings that wouldn't contribute to productivity.

See also: https://thetreehousepartners.com/review-rowe-results-work-en...

https://www.gorowe.com/

Rant: I hate brainstorming meetings. A manager who wants to feel like they are doing something invite a mix of one or two experts, a clueless pm, engineers from an unrelated project, and handful of random ones hers. Next, with zero preparation we’re supposed to come up with groundbreaking new ideas. Then there is some voting and finally waiting for a summary or gameplay that’s postponed until the heat death of the universe. Perhaps I will bring cookies next time.

In my experience, a lot of people call a meeting to try and make something happen. The thing _should_ be happening already but the team is not working efficiency in a well-thought-out manner. Rather than figure out what the real problem is with the working practices, or recognising some genuinely novel feature of the situation that is blocking progress, they resort just booking meeting after meeting until somehow it is resolved. I don't attend meetings without an agenda and at least a (sometimes optimistic) list of what the outputs of the meeting should be. Decision on X. Routes of investigation for Y. Outline plan on Z.

I’ve spent probably 60-70% of my day in meetings for the past 5 years. Article makes some good points. An agenda in the invite, moderator+the authority to tell _anyone_ on the call to stfu, minutes, and ending on time.

Some things I’d add: 1. Written next steps/follow-ups for what happens after the meeting 2. Due dates for next steps and the consequences for missing due dates 3. A log of decisions made and by whom 4. And just a general observation that if there are more than 10 people in the meeting it should be more like a webinar (one way information flow) vs a discussion with decisions/solutions expected.

Edit: 99.9% of my meetings are teams calls. Maybe 20 in person meetings in the past 5 years so consider that when reading my suggestions above.

Every meeting can be put in a category:

1:1s. Not really skippable, necessary part of work..

Update meetings: team update, all hands, demos, etc. Record and share out a link . Let people watch in their own time. Optionally do the meeting live (in person, online, etc.) for whoever wants to be physically/digitally present and "watch at 1x speed"

Decision meetings. Adhoc only and only when more efficient than taking a decision async (Slack, shared document, etc.) - shouldn't be skipped as these can be crucial for maintaining alignment

Planning meetings. Backlog grooming, retro, standup. Pare these back to their component pieces. Make more of the component pieces async over time. Can you groom the backlog purely async? Can standup be a Slack bot? Can retro be part of 1:1s, or another Slack bot? Other teams have found ways!

And then call out meetings' categories so your team can cull certain types of meetings.

There are 2 kinds of meetings:

1. Briefings: meant to disseminate marching orders, find any last minute blockers/disagreements, and clarify any differences in interpretation of those marching orders. These should be infrequent, timed, and formal

2. Brainstorms: development meetings to identify, interpret, and develop action plans for problems, products, ideas, whatever. These should be frequent, open-ended, and informal

The human brain hates meetings. It sees people. Tall, short, poorly dressed, overly dressed, it sees the sittings arrangements, someone with the arms crossed, someone is laughing, wait, are we here to talk about technical issues? They want answers now? Why now? Someone is not happy, why? Someone has a question, is Dan, probably something obvious..

That is not how the human brain works. To believe a creative mind is in problem-solving mode when sequestered into 1 hour or 30 minutes social gathering is bizarre. The best technical interactions I've seen happened randomly at a lab when everybody else has left for the day or while at hike chat on a trail during lunch time.

This seems good from the attendie’s point of view. I would love a similar post on the culture for calling meetings. There are too many “I don’t want to make an effort to understand/solve issue X so I’ll just create a meeting with everyone who might have an interest so we can all spend 1h talking about if the issue is an issue at all, and if it’s an issue what do we do about it”.. makes me so tired.

this feels like advice for the person running the meeting, not the one being dragged into it. I'm just picturing myself telling my boss "Sorry, this meeting doesn't have a clear goal, so I'm dropping off." Anyone actually have the guts to do this when you're not the senior person in the room?

I know this is HN, and my instincts tell me posters here predominately are either ICs or managers "in the small" (line level, or at the most at the scale of the OP, in which the company is ~300).

That said, asserting that most meetings are either brainstorming or decision making, is naive. When an organization grows beyond ~100-150 people (Dumbar's Number) the org must metastasize into smaller, "self-contained", orgs that are far less than that number. Once this happens, there is need for meetings that drive accountability, closure, and alignment at scale. For example, monthly or quarterly business reviews.

These are NOT brainstorming meetings or decision-making meetings. They are meetings where leadership drives accountability and alignment by ensuring light is shined (in a way visible cross-org) on the right topics for the biz.

At my ex employer, every employee had an hourly rate in the system, I had thought of pulling the rates from the internal system into Microsoft teams, to display the cost of every meeting.

Btw, question to the wisdom of HN: Good meetings need minutes.

Is there a minutes taking tool that does automatically list the attendants and their join/leave times, allow me to create items like TODO, DECISION, POLL, DISCUSS_MORE, GET_INFO, BLOCKER that will then be tabulated and cross-referenced automatically across more than one meeting? And added to the TODO-lists of participants referenced?

Preferrably somewhat independently of the conference tool in use, because that varies a lot around here.

"This meeting could have been an email." - yeah, if people actually read their emails.

One of my rules of thumb is that every single one of the meeting participants should have individually prepared for at least as long as the meeting is, or it's a public announcement or training and not a meeting.

If you can't get someone to commit to that, it sounds like you don't need them in the meeting anyway.

I think this misses the mark for why people join. We're talking about a professional setting here, I'm coming to your meeting because you invited me to join, not because of fear of missing out (on what?). All the points given in the article are good, but it misses the most important one: if you're hosting a meeting, only invite people who MUST [0] be there. If the meeting could still take place and be useful without someone, don't invite them just to listen in. If you want, shoot an email to a mailing list or post in Slack about it, but don't invite people just because.

[0] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

At least for the efficient part of this, I've always felt the fix is just a display of the estimated cost of the meeting (perhaps an average or lower bound to avoid revealing pay).

The same people who will fuss over $20 lunch expense limits will happily spend thousands on meetings without a thought.

I walked into nearly every meeting I ever attended with a list and my working journal. If I have something important to share I bring a few copies of my highlights or just list things about other activities that I care about.

I’m an introspective introvert who found this the one time to hear everyone else’s pulse.

As for the meeting, each culture will evolve into what works for those involved. Leadership and horizontal stake factors shape how people share their views and listen.

> Knowledge should be spread in a format that is more resilient to time than our memories[...] For example; written text.

A worthy goal. However I know several people who are apparently unable (or unwilling) to read anything, and instead default to calling a meeting for any sort of communication or knowledge transfer.

The best part is shifting the mindset from "everyone should attend everything just in case" to "trust the system, read the minutes, and show up when it actually matters." That alone could rescue hours of deep work time each week.

Great advice here! I especially like the idea of 50 minute meetings.

I’ve been lightly enforcing a rule of my own too: “no agenda, no attenda”

lol our company (1k+ employees) pretty much violates each item on this list

We typically don't take minutes. Advance agendas are often non existent. And we definitely put a premium on presenting vs written comms

And yes it leads to a lot of FOMO / meetings.

Too many mistakes/typos in text.

That's a signal for me. A signal, that the author of this shit of an article didn't bother reading his own article before publishing it.

This article brings nothing new useful to the table. That's a rehash of someone else's rehash of something they've read somewhere.

> It feels rude to leave the meeting before it’s done

It's not rude to leave a meeting if there is a competent chair who can set clear beginnings and endings to topics and MC while people enter and exit during transitions.

The reality of meetings in most places I've seen is that key stakeholders have already formed an opinion beforehand, the meeting is a place to disseminate decisions that have already been made and align the organization.

Having an agenda and a moderator is not enough. What meetings also need is:

1. Context: Why are we here? What's the problem we're solving?

2. Actions: What decisions did we make? What are the next steps?

3. Follow-up: Who's doing what and by when?

Put this in a shared doc, a wiki, anywhere people can find it. If you can't see it, you can track it and you can't measure the outcome.

Just like developers measure the outcome of their planning and project meetings every sprint, managers and execs should do the same.

In theory, two things will happen once outcomes are tracked: Some managers will realise their meetings produce nothing useful, so they'll send fewer invites. And the company will shift focus from output to outcomes, which means fewer meetings and more real work getting done.

In practice, it depends on who you hire. People with less knowledge, experience, or agency tend to rely on meetings more than others.

"Meetings are primarily for two things:" ... "Brainstorming" ..., ... "Making a decision as a group" ... "Secondary" ... "to expand and clarify knowledge"

I've said this before,

The "engineer's" pov on meetings is that they are an incredibly poor and overused instrument of getting things done and that it is beyond comprehension why "the company" continues to tolerate such expensive nonsense.

The manager's (current and aspiring) pov on meetings, especially physical presence meetings, is that they are the most effective way to reinforce the hierarchy/pecking order, sense allegiances and potential defectors, scout opportunities for ascension, or destabilize a rival in public.

You might call this 'cynical', but is it really when you lay out the facts?

As for the author's specific points:

Brainstorming in a meeting is by far the least effective way. It just comes down to the most brazen flaunting their unnuanced opinions in rapid fire while more considerate and intricate reasoning is speed ran and drowned out by loud advocacy.

"Group decisions", yes, to a point. Mostly needing 'formal' buy-in to CYA on a decision already made. "If you already knew this would be the (bad) outcome, why did you not speak up at the all hands meeting? Obviously you and everyone else supported this at the time".

"to expand and clarify knowledge": That is most often a lecture/presentation with Q&A attached, not a meeting

People seemed to be brainwashed into thinking that meetings are ... actually necessary. If people can build the Linux kernel without meetings, solely over email, then your $1.99 app, or your project requiring coordinating more than two people can be done the same way. Write it down, debate and argue in text so anyone interested can see what's going on. There's your minutes, your agenda, your invite for future ones right there. Now go back to work (or continue, since you didn't have to leave it in the first place) and stop bothering people.

I would praise any leader that has the courage to call the meeting spade a spade knowing they're just corporate-sanctioned babysitting exercises, myth to be discarded.

Sending a single representative of a team to a meeting is one of favourite hacks. And then have that representative report back.

Seems like solid advice indeed, I'm going to try and stick to these guidelines, too often meetings could have been an e-mail or bit of text and take too long.

If there are no consequences for missing a meeting then I know I don't need to be in the meeting.

If you want to know about effective meetings, just read Traction and look into EOS.

I like the article, but there's a simpler underlying problem.

Are people calling meetings to yap, or with clear and concise goals?

Yappers do not understand the difference because their meetings are not bereft of articulable utility.

Don't go over.

Ever.

Also keep the meeting to a 50 minute max.

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