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

>> "meeting without biscuits"

I like that (biscuits not the idea of being reprimanded), A former co-worker used to respond in a friendly (but he meant it!) way "no agenda; no attenda"

That's a good analogy / way to think about it, the stand-up should be more of a social call anyway (especially for remote work) to check in with each other and whatever they're working on, but anything in-depth should be done outside of it.

Tea party brings up images of little girls and stuffed animals around a table to my American mind, but I get what you mean.

My team has a weekly meeting with no management allowed and no agenda. I bring up anything important right at the start, then we go around and give everyone a chance to say what they're working on. No assignments are given out, but people who need help with something can ask and usually get it.

The main purpose of the meeting is to just keep everyone updated on what the rest of the team is doing and give us some water-cooler time. It makes up, in a small way, for the lack of personal interaction we have since going remote. I keep management out because I want us to be free to speak our minds.

The rest of our meetings are more formal and focused and get more actual work done, but without the "tea party" (I'm starting to like that term) we start losing cohesion as a team.

I find that a good way to get out of some meetings is to ask for an agenda up front (since one is hardly ever provided). I can usually reply to the agenda items with 90% of the info they are looking for, and then that spawns a short back and forth to hammer out the other 10% over email. It works more often than not, but not as much as I'd like.

These days it is trivial to record the meeting and have it transcribed and then summarized by an LLM to produce "automatic" minutes. Searchability is a bonus.

While standups often drift into ceremonial territory, the social/presence aspect isn't nothing

Agendas are critical is deciding a) do I care and b) can I help.