How do we make remote meetings not suck?

In our organization, remote meetings don't suck. It more or less just happened organically because we are a fairly flat organization but in a traditional industry.

Mostly no cameras. I don't even own a webcam.

A meeting is called for a reason (even if it's recurring). We have no "this is the morning meeting" kind of meetings.

There a single person in charge of the meeting. This is most often the person who wants to get resolved the thing the meeting is about. This isn't enforced it's just a natural consequence of someone booking a meeting.

Most meetings are between 2-5 people. Large recurring meetings are maybe max 12-15 people. In the large meeting, there is a rough agenda and everyone speaks to their part of the agenda in turn. Anyone can speak up if they have something relevant to add but otherwise they are muted. This is usually when I get my laundry folded.

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.

It seems to me that the problem isn’t that remote meetings suck but that meetings suck. My writing group meets remotely because (a) covid and (2) one of the members moved to Ohio from Chicago. We manage not to have the issues about people interrupting etc., likely because we (a) care about what we’re doing and (2) actually that caring about what we’re doing really covers it. We do have structure in that we’re workshopping 2–3 stories per session and we have a four-part agenda for each story (aboutness, likes, suggestions, questions). Everybody has done the necessary homework before the meeting (in this case read the stories and written up their notes), but the structure means that we avoid a common workshop trap of everybody just reading their notes to the group and since you know your notes will go to the writer, you don’t need to feel obligated to say everything you’ve written down.

Thinking about this, I can see pretty clearly how this could be translated into work meetings pretty easily and fits with a lot of the other commentary here.

But bottom line, either the meetings will suck or they won’t and what matters is not whether they’re in-person or remote but how they’re run.

> if the goal is instead to deliver info to the attendees, your meeting should be an email

If we just stuck to this rule I would have hours of more time to do actual work.

So many “meetings,” are listening to folks um-and-ah their way through their slides. They read the exact text they wrote. Slowly. It’s painful.

Just send an email.

If this happens in recurring meetings, make an email digest.

This article keeps talking about "the caucus problem", but never actually defines it. I couldn't follow the post at all because every problem kept ending with "but this isn't the real problem, the caucus problem is".

> So the thing is, human social relationships demand structure.

This is the part I agree with the most. I'm not sure about the rest.

I can only speak from the perspective of a software engineer. Many meetings, especially daily standups, do not prioritize and filter out user stories and tasks causing them to take way too long. People zone out making the meetings less effective. It's basically weaponized on some projects especially when the management doesn't have a clue what's going on. It enables the blame game e.g. "well why didn't you say something during the meeting?"

It's usually pretty clear what should be discussed, but it's rare to see a project manager who looks at the activity stream on Jira or equivalent. There's usually a huge disconnect between management and dev teams in general, even on a relatively "well run" project where everything goes as planned with minimal friction. Devs wind up picking up a lot of slack and just have their own informal meetings amongst themselves to remedy it.

This is terrible long term. Every project I've ever been on inevitably hits a snag and all this unravels into management going into freak out mode when they realize how big these communication gaps have become.

I just have a policy of as few meetings (remote or FTF), as possible. No repeating, scheduled ones. All meetings should be ad hoc (so no daily standups or weekly roundups).

As I worked for a Japanese company, these ideas found stony soil, but now that I'm on my own, I try to keep this policy.

Fully agree with the article's focus on proper meeting discipline.

This can be coupled with Edward Tufte's suggestions on how to present at a meeting. To summarize, he says that there is no point sending a presentation in advance .. most will not read it anyway. Instead of a presentation, write about 5-6 six pages of prose and hand them out at the beginning of the meeting. Every one will scan the document in their own ways and write up questions. After 20 minutes or so, start discussing the document. This way, the presenter doesn't have to drone on about things that everyone knows, and one can focus on real questions.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/files/Consume_Produce_14_15.pdf

Every meeting starts with an agenda and ends with minutes or don't bother showing up

Or admit that their de facto purpose is to socialize on company time, which is something that should be done but is hard to quantify

I appreciate the attempt to bring structure to meetings. I agree structure is necessary, but I feel like the article is committing the same sin that it decries: "rewarding A but hoping for B"

If you blindly rebalance meetings based on "caucus score", you'll get less ideas from the loud people and more ideas from the quiet people ("A"). You won't necessarily get better ideas overall ("B").

IMO, the "floor" should be given primarily to people with a track record of clearly and concisely expressing novel and good ideas, no matter how loud or quiet those people are. Figuring out who those people are is hard and probably can't be nicely described in a blog post.

No one has a meaningful contribution for every topic, and most people don't have the self-awareness to know whether their contribution is meaningful or not. Any good meeting structure has to be able to handle that common situation in a safe and healthy way.

This article may be 6 years old, but it jives with my experiences having worked remotely for a variety of companies and in a mix of remote/onsite organizations for 11 years. In fact, the moderation suggestion is exactly how I've solved the caucus problem without actually being able to name the problem or the solution. This article is going to be my go to for referencing how meetings ought to be run and why.

The only other article that really feels like it nails a nagging problem that I've never been able to articulate but stumbled across often is "Why developers don't water the plants" https://yorkesoftware.com/2017/05/03/why-dont-developers-wat...

Answering the title: like we do at GitLab. https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture/all-rem...

I wish I could enforce meeting rules at work but they are dictated by TPTB. We recently had cameras forced on because management suspected people weren't paying attention. That is correct. The meetings are regularly derailed by someone, typically some kind of Product Manager, waxing poetic about whatever they think is important. Cameras-on made life even worse. Now I have to sit prim and proper in my chair for 30 extra minutes because no one will shut the malignant extrovert up. Work gets delayed, boredom sets in, etc.

I don't even know who to blame for this. It's really not much better than it was in person. In person meetings sucked more, as you had to be physically present to be talked at, and at least with a remote meeting I can just minimize the meeting and try to get back to work.

I would estimate 90% of my meetings are useless. 50% of the 10% remaining could be emails, and 50% are probably worth it. Why can't I just build software? Perhaps PMs and management should get their own meeting where they can just listen to themselves talk.

I suspect that most people have issue on mere work tools, they do know by names tools from another era, while they never really used them, but they do not know the modern tools, so they create in their own minds strange hybrids between the old tools they never used and the new one.

In the past was common having meetings in a physical room, because the office was a needed tool due to paper-based workflows, and since attending demand certain time not only to meet but also to prepare the meeting, going to the right place and so on they was organized in certain formats. Things are, or should and must be different, but most fails to understand how to use new tools properly.

In the modern connected world attending a meeting is damn cheap, but we also have other tools to collaborate and depending on the task such other tools are better. Having searchable text trails, developing certain topics slowly a message at a time, having few "spontaneous" meetings between only few, than openly discussing something often is much better. But you should know modern tools and all must use them seriously.

stop having them and rely largely on email for communications that should in fact be email.

Better meeting skills in person help make remote meetings better.

Lots of great tips in the comments, for me it's making sure meetings don't become a timepass.

Meeting cadence whtn the meetings are new is important. Often eaiser to have a regular meeting and a mini check in the frist while until things are going.

Ongoing Cadence is important, too often or too little time to get things done can be hindrance.

Days of week can make a difference too. Talk Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon to leave time for people to start dealing with their week, and also on Thursdays to have enough time to finish something for Friday.

The later in the week a meeting is, the less that can be done about it that week and it can perpetually push into the next week.

Group note taking and agenda - there are neat meeting management apps out there that make things more interactive like carrying forward agenda items automatically, sending out the agenda for you in advance, etc.

Note taking - This has become easier with AI, but having someone still send them out is great. Depending on whether management wants, having an out line of people's tasks documented to them can make it easier, but everyone should be taking notes to not get dependent on this. If this can be available often meetings can be shorter.

Agendas and concise materials before meeting- can help people catch up and prepare to help make sure the meeting is about decisions and discussions in support of a discussion, and not discussion for the sake of doing the work on the meeting itself.

Juniors first - one for the best things Ive ever seen is having juniors offer their input and thoughts first, which can be followed up outside the meeting with ongoing mentorship with seniors. it can be as simple as this is what I have learned to understand about this, and the rest of the team learns that they can rely on this person more.

From a tech side, something novel and fresh every so often can help. Learn to use Zoom/Teams/Mmmhmm and it keeps it visually interesting and easy to pass around updates.

The main issue that this gets at is that meeting time is a valuable company resource and a contentious resource for employees and should be managed as such.

People shouldn’t feel free to chime in with half-baked ideas in meetings or call meetings willy-nilly any more than they would play horseshoes with equipment from the supply closet, use the company credit card for grocery shopping, or call in sick to play golf.

What appropriate policies look like probably do vary by company and team but the policy shouldn’t just be that anyone with access to the calendar software can call a meeting or that anyone in the meeting can speak at any time.

Remote meetings and meetings in general are good when there is an outcome for the meeting, when there are only the people that NEED to be in the meeting, the meeting is short enough to create outcomes without blabbering on and the timeframe is adhered to.

I cannot stand it when a 15 minute stand up, becomes a 30+ minute discussion that rolls into the next one and the next one.

The closer meetings are to a conversation with a couple people, the better. No one likes the one presenting to twenty slog. That sort of meeting always could have been an email because there isn’t enough time for everyone to have meaningful back and forth conversation or give good feedback.

Latency is the killer for me. Both with video calls and even just with cell phone calls. Old school phone calls could be spontaneous and collaborative almost as good as meeting in person, because latency was as close to zero as possible and you could properly hear both people talking at the same time. But the delays and lack of good audio mixing in cell and video-call tech mean it’s impossible to use in the same way. Given the fundamental differences, then, the better solution is to use video calls only for highly structured meetings and to use other tools like chat and email (gasp) for remote collaboration.

purely technical, but lower latency (even at the cost of crackles), make everyone have a good mic, emulated spacial audio.

I think these things would help so so much. I wonder if there is any research on the impact of these.

Remote meetings don't suck. They save time and resources.

(2018)

Related from earlier:

Why do remote meetings suck so much?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40953914

The "caucus" format as the reason that remote meeting suck doesn't make much sense in the context of our thesis of "remote meetings" suck, since it's not unique to remote meetings. If we go with that conclusion, IRL meetings should suck, too, and the remote-ness is inconsequential.

Though … IMO, that fits: remote meetings and IRL meetings suck equally to me, and the "caucus" reasoning seems to jive with my experience.

Good luck fixing it, though; the ruling class of management is the ones with the authority to implement moderation, and AFAICT management as a profession is not convinced that meetings are bad. (Or at the very best, they're only convinced that everyone else's meetings are bad.)

"if we do online meetings all of you can work from home"

any other questions ?

Culture is hard. The effort that executives and leaders in originations with good culture exert to maintain it is often underestimated.

Make them shorter and more focused.

(2018)

hint: It's the company that sucks not the meeting :/

“The only winning move is not to play."