[gumby]

We have a system that works well for our small founding team.

Normally I am pretty hardcore that meetings need an agenda (can be loose) and intended outcome when the meeting invitation is sent out, or else I don’t attend.

BUT our small founding team has an exception: we have a daily, morning, remote, agendaless meeting. It’s the opposite of a standup: you can talk about anything. Sometimes it’s things that have fallen through the cracks; I can’t help doing standupy things myself (“this is what I’m doing today in 20 seconds” but that’s just me;) we also hear that so and so’s daughter just got engaged, someone else will be busy coz their spouse will be having a procedure today and they want to drop them off/get them from the hospital, etc. it’s to provide the “water cooler” experience of in the office. Important things get decided too. And we skip sometimes, perhaps one day every other week, since it’s like a bus and will come around tomorrow again.

We do overlap in person at times in the lab but they aren’t awkward because we all have a common social context.

It won’t scale as we grow, unfortunately.

[soneca]

We have that habit in the small company I work too, and it’s great. It does not scale indeed, and it only works if, outside of those, you only have very few meetings, but I enjoy having this more humane and organic connection with my coworkers