>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.

I’m in a company of +6k.

> Rule 1 was to have an agenda available in the meeting invite

Same rule here, but enforced.

We are allowed (and encouraged) to cancel or decline invitations without an agenda here.

In my experience, it makes a big positive difference, when people have to justify why they need someone’s time and provide a rough frame for the discussion.

Much more focused, much more efficient. Fewer meeting where I think “I shouldn’t have joined”.

Completely agree re:leadership.

I worked in a couple companies with the "agenda rule" but I worked at one company in particular where it was successful. In that company, leadership had a "no nonsense" type approach and it only took a few reply alls from leaders to meeting requests with "Where is the agenda?" for everyone to fall in line. It also helped that every meeting they sent out contained an agenda.

> Everyone had to take an online class (about 8 hours) about effective meetings

As soon as I read this line I grimaced. This is a clear sign of an organization that doesn't respect peoples' time. The class should be an email (and proper follow-up by the management chain) establishing three rules:

- Meetings must have an agenda

- After a meeting, there must be a follow-up email describing what was decided and any action items

- Recurring meetings should be rare/exceptional

- Given good meeting notes and action items sent afterwards, reduce the invite list to decision makers; people who need to be informed can be added to the follow-up email

> I think setting the culture for good meetings is set by leadership

All culture depends on leadership maintaining it. They have the power to not only set culture, mostly, but even more so they have the power to break culture. You can't have a bottom-up culture that'll withstand leadership ignoring or breaking it.

If leadership doesn't inspire trust, that'll spread through the rest of the company very quickly.

An ex-director I worked for had a habit of sending out non-descript meeting requests for Friday afternoon. You never knew if it was was something trivial or layoff announcements. I think he enjoyed spreading panic among his people :-)

It's got to be a good agenda, too. It can't just be "discuss delivery of project X" or "sync on status of feature Y". Those are too generic. The agenda needs to make it clear what the outcome of the meeting is, and who needs to be there.

I'm the only person I know of who writes real agendas for meetings at my company (which is only about 120 people). It's clearly not caught on, but I do it anyway almost as a protest at this point.

Companies that allow agenda free meetings are just begging for high control people to generate unnecessary meetings.

This can be dominating high control or anxious/disorganized high control, either way it's a waste of people time.

Classic case of "do as I say, not as I calendar."