A collection of random thoughts about meetings at work as they pass through my mind.
I don’t like silent starts
Apparently originating from Amazon, silent starts is a meeting practice where each meeting starts with everyone spending 15-30 minutes reading through the material in silence.
I don’t like this approach for a couple of reasons: I think most materials need more time to process and think for us to be able to provide good insights and ideas than 15 minutes of reading followed by immediate discussion and decision making.
Also, I think that if you don’t have time to prep for meetings, something’s wrong with the prioritisation or having too many meetings or too much work. The proponents of this practice argue that it’s pointless to try to make sure everyone takes time for meetings so this is better than no preparation and I can agree on that. I want to work in environments where these kinds of meetings — if organised — are treated with more appreciation and prepared for so that we can make better progress.
At least it doesn’t work for me: either I prep for the meeting and then awkwardly spend 15 minutes idling or I don’t prep and don’t have time to come up with good comments or ideas and the meeting becames bit of a waste.
If one is remote, everyone is remote
No meetings where there’s bunch of people in a shared meeting room with a single camera nad mic and others join remotely on their own devices. This can create big imbalance of dynamics as people in the room might communicate verbally or nonverbally by accident with people in the room, excluding those who join remotely.
It’s also harder to mute entire room accounts which can cause background noises from the office.
There’s also imbalance in reading cues for when other person is finishing their part and a lag for a remote person starting so it can lead to people in the meeting room having “better” or “priority” access to speaking.
It also helps in build trust and interpersonal relationships when you can see everyone (given that everyone’s cameras are on) and it’s easier to recognise who is speaking.
If one person is remote, everyone should be remote – tempertemper by Martin Underhill