[_fool]

These are probably the two best interesting aka "seemingly not in wide use" ideas we've tried, with great results:

- 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.

[Bluepacsky]

I really appreciate the second point and the mentioned ideas! That is great advise. I think having everybody write status updates in advance can be a great idea but how do you make sure that does not turn out to be more work than just sharing those updates verbally in the meeting?

[_fool]

It's not that it's less work!

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.