[contingencies]

Run less or no meetings.

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...

[unethical_ban]

This is nuts. Having management approve meetings? How about "learn to communicate: decline unnecessary meetings and figure out how to reconcile disagreements".

[hyperman1]

This is how you end up with meetings to decide if a meeting is needed.

[muzani]

Isn't it the same thing? The approvals are to verify that the meeting is necessary.

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.

[DiggyJohnson]

They are not the same thing. I'm not disagreeing with the specific example you supplied, either.

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.

[Bluepacsky]

That is true. I think many engineers would feel less empowered if approval for meetings was needed. I think that is not feasible.

[Bluepacsky]

I like the general idea of having less meetings. I try to cut time down for meetings I am responsible for. However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not). 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. But it feels that often written content ahead of time (such as the amazon approach) would alleviate that need. Do you have any advise on how to deal with inefficient meeting culture by others?

How do you use anonymous feedback? We do not have any tools in place for this but I do like the idea.

[shalmanese]

> However, there are ~10 hours of meetings each week that I need to join either because: 1. There is an expectation by management that I should be there in case they have a question (often they do not).

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.

[n4r9]

I quite like this and I feel like you could go one better and have optional people be "on call" during the meeting i.e. they should be available to ring in if needed.

[shalmanese]

We tried that initially and there was just a bit too much friction involved in them finding the zoom link and then joining and then getting their mic connected and everything. It was easier to just have them join the meeting in the beginning and be muted so it was ~5s for them to hop into a convo.

[contingencies]

deal with inefficient meeting culture

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.

[g_p]

One thing businesses should be aware of here, if they go for this, is the legal risk that such transcripts end up being disclosed in a legal discovery process. Most businesses wouldn't want every word that's said in a meeting to be recorded and stored "forever" (which it likely is, if you use a third party cloud based tool).

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.

[ethanpil]

can you provide some specific recommendations here?

[contingencies]

https://github.com/mozilla/DeepSpeech

[globular-toast]

> Scheduling-wise, optimize meetings for less productive periods (late afternoon, first thing in the morning pre-coffee, right after lunch, etc.).

Wait, you just mentioned all times. I'm most productive late in the afternoon. Not everyone is the same.

[ecesena]

I agree on the premise to minimize meetings.

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.

[zhte415]

With 400 emails per day the last thing I'd want to do is add another time-waster on approving a meeting and collecting feedback on it, meeting minutes are sufficient.

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.

[madcaptenor]

"late afternoon, first thing in the morning pre-coffee, right after lunch"

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.